* * * *

_The Lighter Side of School Life_ (FOULIS) is one of the merriest and
shrewdest books that I have met for a long time. Mr. IAN HAY
pleasantly dedicates his work "to the members of the most responsible,
the least advertised, the worst paid, and the most richly rewarded
profession in the world"; and you will not have turned two pages
before discovering that the writer of them knows pretty thoroughly
what he is writing about. For my own part I claim to have some
experience both of schoolmasters and boys, and I can say at once that
the former at least have seldom been dealt with more faithfully than
by Mr. HAY. His chapter on "Some Form Masters" is a thing of the
purest joy; bitingly true, yet withal of a kindly sympathy with his
victims. One would say that he knows boys as well, were it not for the
conviction that to imagine any kind of understanding of Boydom is (if
my contemporaries will forgive me) the last enchantment of the
middle-aged, and the most fallacious. As for the Educational experts,
he has all the cold and calculated hate for them that is the mark of
experience. I admired especially his treatment of the "craze for
practical teaching," the theory which holds, for example, that,
instead of postulating a fixed relation between the circumference of a
circle and its diameter, a teacher should supply his boys with several
ordinary tin canisters, a piece of string and a ruler, and leave the
form to work out their own result. Decidedly, Mr. HAY has seen _The
Lighter Side of School Life_ with the eye of knowledge; and when I
mention that your own eyes will here encounter a dozen pictures by Mr.
LEWIS BAUMER at his delightful best--well, I suppose, enough said.

* * * * *

[Illustration: "KAISER BACK TO THE FRONT."

(ATTEMPTED ILLUSTRATION TO A RECENT POSTER OF THE EVENING
PRESS.)]

* * * * *

At one time, I hope for ever gone, Mr. PERCY WHITE'S sense of irony
ran away with him. He seemed to have said to himself, "I can write
witty dialogue and I have a shrewd eye for foibles, and if you are not
satisfied with that you can take it or leave it." I for one took it,
but always with a feeling that he was offering me a sparkling wine of
a quality not first-rate, whereas with a little more trouble and
expense he could have offered me an unimpeachable brand. Now that
_Cairo_ (CONSTABLE) has provided me with what I have been waiti