water and lemonade. I had entirely forgotten cracknels until
Miss Ashford came along yesterday and reminded me of them.

In "A Short History of Love and Marriage"--and how woefully short
sometimes is the history of a love and how short too, perhaps, the
history of a marriage!--she shows to us that for all its admitted
shortness the narrative is properly rounded out. For on page 24 we learn
that the happy couple went on a bridal tour to India and "seven hours
after they got there had two twin babies." Seven hours and two twin
babies, a magnificent showing surely and the prevalent rage for
shortness maintained to the very end! Page 24 is one of the very best
pages in this book, containing, as it also does, a painstaking
description of perhaps the most striking and interesting marriage-morn
costume worn by any bridegroom in the Christian era.

It is not my intention to quote over-liberally from the contents of this
volume. To my way of thinking the trick of inserting copious extracts
from a novel into the foreword of that novel is as great a mistake as
though I invited you to my house for dinner and before dinner gave you
tidbits and choice bites from each course. I should merely be dulling
your appetite, without satisfying your hunger.

My aim is to direct your attention, if I may make so bold, to certain
pages, specifying them by their numbers and trusting that when you have
progressed so far you will, in the reading of them, find the same joy
and the same zest that I have found there. For example, on page 46 I
respectfully invite your consideration to the pains taken in enumerating
the various articles of one Sylvia's running-away or elopement
trousseau. There was a thorough young woman for you, and a provident.

On page 87 occurs mention of two sisters and here, despite my promise of
two paragraphs ago, I cannot resist the temptation to quote one short
but tremendously illuminating line. The author is speaking now of two
sisters and of the elder she says, she "was by no means beautiful but
she was intensely good." How often it happens that those who are by no
means beautiful are intensely good--how often and sometimes oh, how easy
for them to be so good. But most of us, even those who educate our
faculties of observation the better to earn a living thereby, are very
much older than eleven years before we discern this great truth.

I think the brightest gems of all this collection are to be found, in
the greatest p