the comfortable fashion of early nineteenth-century days, were content to let well alone at eight shillings a week. Perhaps it was this restful attitude that decided the publishers to claim for this volume the distinctive quality of "charm." * * * * * After a considerable interval, Mr. ARNOLD LUNN has followed _The Harrovians_ with another school story, _Loose Ends_ (HUTCHINSON). This, however, is a tale not so much about boys as about masters, the real hero being not _Maurice Leigh_ (with whose adventures school-novelists of an earlier day would solely have concerned themselves), the pleasantly undistinguished lad who enters Hornborough in the first chapter and leaves it in the last, but _Quirk_, the young and energetic master, whose efforts to vitalize the very dry bones of Hornborough education hardly meet the success that they deserve. Concerning this I am bound to add that I found some difficulty in accepting Mr. LUNN'S picture as quite fair to an average public school in the early twentieth century. That its authorities should have been so violently perturbed by a proposal to teach SHAKSPEARE histrionically, or by the spectacle of boys enjoying modern poetry, surely supposes conditions almost incredibly archaic. This, however, does nothing to detract from the admirably-drawn figure of _Quirk_ himself, bursting with energy, enthusiasm and intolerance, overcoming passive resistance on the part of the boys, only to be shipwrecked upon the cast-iron prejudice of the staff. That his apotheosis should have been translation to Rugby, where he finds "the beaks much easier to get on with," perhaps shows that Mr. LUNN does not intend those of Hornborough as wholly typical of the most abused race in fiction. For the rest, the boy characters of the book are presented with a quiet realism very refreshing after some recent "sensational revelations." Mr. LUNN'S boys, alike in their speech and outlook, are admirably observed; indeed the persons of the tale struck me throughout as being better than its rather out-of-date happenings. * * * * *