s so excellent as to arouse the fear that it
will not be taken. Yet Miss HARRISON is justified of her endeavours.
She shows how often the English governors of Ireland have failed, in
spite of the best intentions, only because they applied their remedy
too late and thus, to their own great surprise, wasted the generosity
of which they were perhaps too conscious. According to Miss HARRISON
the gombeenman is the curse of Ireland, the serpent whose presence, if
only he can be reduced to being an absentee, warrants us in regarding
Ireland as a possible Eden. Miss HARRISON will please to take the
preceding sentence as proving my entire sympathy with Irish modes
of thought and expression and, generally, with Ireland. Against
the gombeener (who is a shop-keeper running his business on the
long-credit system) she invokes a vision of the blessings of
co-operation. One of her heroes is Sir HORACE PLUNKETT, and, indeed,
the work of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, over which
he has presided, has been an unmixed benefit to Ireland. I heartily
endorse Miss HARRISON'S hope that "at no distant period all will
be well with Ireland." Her book should certainly help towards this
result.

* * * * *

Captain VERE SHORTT fell at Loos in September of 1915, and left twelve
chapters of a story, _The Rod of the Snake_ (LANE), which his sister
has finished and very capably finished; helped by the recollection of
many intimate conversations about the plot and its development. It
tells how young _Charlie Shandross_, bidding his preposterous soldier
uncle be hanged, shook the stale dust of Ballybar off his feet, served
three years in the C.M.R., and so prepared himself for the deadly
adventure of the rod of the snake, the image of the ape, the Haytian
attache and the sinister priestess of Voodoo rites--Paris its setting.
I won't spoil your pleasure by giving the details away; I will only
say it is all very splendidly incredible, but not unplausible, and the
authors do take pains with their puzzles, as where the hero and his
party find the secret spring of the panel in the vault by the blood
tracks of their enemy, who has been thoughtfully wounded in the hand.
A small point but significant; too many writers in this kind being
given to whisking their favourites out of danger in the most arbitrary
manner. A good railway book, of the sort you can confidently pass on
to the soldiers' hospitals after reading it.