left behind; they are well printed and attractively got up. From the writer's personal experience, an infantry officer can be quite adequately provided for in this matter of reading if he were sent out from home a couple of these cheap books a week. It is a system followed with great success by a great many officers on active service. one interested in serious reading, it would be a great boon to have some sort of literary godfather or godmother who would at regular intervals dispatch him a parcel of these cheap books of a nature to appeal to the literary mind.

For

Many battalions in the field have a sort of floating library made up of these cheap books, also of magazines, sent out from home or purchased at any of the larger towns in the war zone, which, lent from hand to hand, circulate round the different messes, and eventually get either left behind or carried along with the mess things to the next destination. In my own battalion more than once, when the billets have been bad and the weather on a par with the accommodation, some of us have raided these company libraries on behalf of the men and made rich captures of booty. It was the oddest collection of literature that we distributed to the men of our company, any number of magazines ranging from the popular monthlies to staid publications like the Quarterly Review, picture papers like the Graphic and the Sketch, copies of the Field galore, and authors as varied as "Sapper" and George Moore (I once handed The Brook Kerith to a Dissenting company sergeant-major and he didn't like it, I remember) or Darwin and "Pitcher."

One may fill one's kit with literary masterpieces, but as often as not it is the god of battles who picks the book that is going to give you the distraction one so often looks for in the trenches under shell-fire. While The

Pilgrim's Progress reposed sweetly in my kit down at the transport lines, I have sat in a dug-out in the front line under a merry shelling and tried to allay my fears by perusing Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales left behind by the former occupants. Friends of mine have had recourse to Fenimore Cooper and the Stores' Catalogue in similar circumstances.

As far as the men are concerned, they seem to have little inclination for the reading of books on active service, even if they had the leisure. They are greedy for newspapers, and nowadays are able to supplement the generous gifts of free copies made by the great London dailies from the newsboys who haunt the back of the Front. "DelliMell, London paper!" is a cry that empties the billets in most of the towns and villages where the divisions go out to rest.

The number of local newspapers to be seen in the trenches of France is an interesting commentary on the territorial ties which unite our different regiments with their native soil. It can hardly be an exaggeration to say that every little township in the United Kingdom which produces its weekly or bi-weekly Gazette or Record has its representative in our vast armies in the field who religiously reads the little home-sheet from cover to

cover.

There is one book that very many of our soldiers carry, and that is the Bible, or at least a prayer-book. Bibles and prayer-books-rain-sodden, bloodstained, tattered, both in English and in German-are fairly familiar objects in the chaotic litter of the battlefield. In the packs of the dead, in the very hands of the dead, you will find them, or abandoned in the bottom of some crumbling trench with loose leaves scattered all around. If one were restricted to taking one book, and one book only, on active service, I think

the choice of many British soldiers would fall upon the Bible. Putting religious questions aside altogether, there is a wonderful aloofness from the The Outlook.

agony and strife of the moment in the majestic English of the Scriptures, while of all books in the English language it is the one most redolent of home. Leander.

"Jap Herron" (Mitchell Kennerley) is a novel which purports to be written from the Ouija board. Also, it purports to have been dictated by the spirit of "Mark Twain." It is a feeble piece of work, and, if one were to accept the assertion of its authorship, it would be with profound regret that the conditions of the spirit life had effected so great deterioration in a style once so charming. About one quarter of the space is taken up with an Introduction describing "The Coming of Jap Herron" by way of the planchette, but only readers who want to be convinced are likely to find it convincing.

It must have been a congenial occupation for Francis W. Halsey, who edited "Great Epochs in American History" to bring together, in a convenient volume, the speeches and documents relating to the most recent and significant epoch, the visits of the Commissions of the Allies. In the book entitled "Balfour, Viviani and Joffre" (Funk & Wagnalls Co.) he has grouped a narrative of the coming of the five Commissions from Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Russia; detailed reports of their reception at Washington, New York, Chicago, Boston and other American cities; the text of the speeches made by Mr. Balfour, M. Viviani, Marshal Joffre and the other Commissioners; and finally, an account of the arrival of American forces in England and France. book is of enduring value as a part of the history of the great

war.

The

Many of Alice Brown's warmest admirers will persist in thinking that the short story offers the best field for her rare gifts of sympathy and interpretation, but her latest novel, "Bromley Neighborhood," should shake their obstinacy. The story of a quiet New England village, its principal characters are: Thomas Neale, a prosperous farmer of the hard, over-bearing type; his sister Tabitha, a timid creature, life-inmate of his home by their father's will, and owner, scarcely realizing her rights, of a handsome wood-lot which plays a crucial part in the plot; his wife Mary, a noble woman of "the serenity attained only by the goading of a passionate will"; their two sons, Hugh, adventurous and high-minded, and Ben, charming, capricious and irresponsible; their humble neighbors, the widowed Ardelia Brock and her daughter Ellen, a beautiful girl of the austerely virginal type; Grissie Gleason, a light-hearted, heedless little flirt; Peleg Simpson, the peddler, courting Ardelia, and Larry Greene, younger brother of the Squire, "the best educated man in town, not excepting the minister, who might have gone to the Legislature but for his habit," and who lives with his dog and his fiddle in a little house on the back road, and guides, philosophizes over and befriends the rest. With the romance of Ellen and Hugh is unfolded the subtler development of Mary Neale's long-suffering love for her husband, and it would be hard to tell which of the two women is the heroine of the book. The Macmillan Co.

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