Chapter 4

Sir JULIAN CORBETT, in writing the first volume of _Naval Operations_ (LONGMANS), has carried the semi-official history of the War at sea only as far as the Battle of the Falklands; but if the other three or four volumes--the number is still uncertain--are to be as full of romance as this the complete work will be a library of adventure in itself. Hardly ever turning aside to praise or blame, he says with almost unqualified baldness a multitude of astounding things--things we half knew, or guessed, or longed to have explained, or dared not whisper, or, most of all, never dreamt of. Here is a gold-mine for the makers of boys' books of all future generations to quarry in. Think, for instance, of the liner _Ortega_ shaking off a German cruiser by bolting into an uncharted tide-race near the Horn; or the _Southport_, left for disabled by her captors, crawling two thousand miles to safety with only half an engine; or the triumphant raider _Karlsruhe_, her pursuers baffled, full to the hatches with captured luxuries, bands playing, flags flying, suddenly blown up in mid-Atlantic. The game of hide-and-seek, as played by the _Emden_ and her like, naturally figures very largely in a volume which HENTY could hardly have bettered. The author's veracious narrative, leaving all picturesque detail to the imagination, gets home every time by the sheer weight of its material. The War in Home waters is no less fascinatingly reconstructed, and the case of maps contains in itself living epics for all who study them with understanding.

* * * * *

In writing her second book Miss HILDA M. SHARP has allowed herself what is, I suspect, the lady novelist's greatest treat, the extraordinary achievement of using the first person singular and making it masculine. She has done it very well too, and I am happy to recall that, in another place, I was among the many who prophesied good concerning her future when she made her _début_ as a novelist with _The Stars in their Courses_ in Mr. FISHER UNWIN'S "First Novel Library." _A Pawn in Pawn_ comes very properly from the same publisher. It has one of those plots which it is most particularly a reviewer's business, in the reader's own interest, not to reveal, but it is permissible to explain that the "pawn" of the title is a little girl adopted from an orphanage, where, as someone says, "the orphans aren't really orphans," by _Julian Tarrant_, whom a select circle acknowledged as the greatest poet that the last years of the nineteenth century produced. Miss SHARP earns my special admiration by getting through the inevitable description of the beginning of the Great War in fewer words than anybody whose attempt I have yet encountered, and steers throughout a pleasant course midway between a "bestseller" and a "high-brow." _Lydia_, the "pawn," is very charming, but quite possibly so, and though, of course, she must marry one of the three men interested in her adoption Miss SHARP will probably keep most of her readers, as she did me, in doubt as to which it is to be until quite the end of the book. I think that he may prove an acquired taste with most readers; but directly I found that he was apt to quote the reviews in _Punch_ I realised that he was a man of discrimination and deserved his good luck.

* * * * *

* * * * *

An Urgent Request.

"---- CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETY, LTD.

Members are requested to hand in their Share Pass Books for Audit Purposes to the Head Office on or before AT ONCE."--_Local Paper._

* * * * *

"Rev. ---- writes:--'I have a Cousin residing in the Transvaal who has been living on three plates of porridge made of ---- for five years, and is well and strong on it.'"--_South African Paper._

It sounds very sustaining.