MR. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, for whose work as a novelist I have more than once expressed high admiration, has now brought together seven long-short stories under the collective title of _The Happy End_ (HEINEMANN). Lest however this name and the little preface, in which the writer asserts that his wares "have but one purpose--to give pleasure," should lead you to expect that species of happy ending in which Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill, I think a word of warning may not be wasted. In only three of the tales is the finish a matter of conventional happiness. Elsewhere you have a deserted husband, who has tracked his betrayer to a nigger saloon in Atlantic City, wrested from his purpose of murder by a revivalist hymn; a young lad, having avenged the destruction of his home, returning to his widowed mother to await, one supposes, the process of the law; or an over-fed war profiteer stricken with apoplexy at sight of a boat full of the starved victims of a submarine outrage. You observe perhaps that the epithet "happy" is one to which the artist and the casual reader may attach a different significance. But let not anything I have said be considered as reflecting upon the tales themselves, which indeed seem to me to be masterpieces of their kind. Personally my choice would rest on the last, "The Thrush in the Hedge," a simple history of how the voice of a young tramp was revealed by his chance meeting with a blind and drug-sodden fiddler who had once played in opera--a thing of such unforced art that its concluding pages, when the discovery is put to a final test, shake the mind with apprehension and hope. A writer who can make a short story do that comes near to genius. * * * * *