r the shadow of a crime seemed to hang over him. I felt instinctively
that he was not fit to play the part I had allotted to him.

I looked back. Smithers was pluckily doing up his bootlace several yards
away; a tactless grin seemed to desolate his features. The grin decided
me.

"Smithers," I called, "hurry up with the tickets; the inspector is
waiting for them. Good day, inspector."

And I walked briskly from the station.

* * * * *

"One hundred and seventy started out, the number including the best of
the English players and the entire American continent."

_Montreal Gazette._

If this is so America was hardly worth discovering.

* * * * *

Illustration: _Long-suffering Vegetarian Lodger._ "DON'T TROUBLE TO
COOK THE CATERPILLARS IN FUTURE, MR. GEDGE. I _NEVER_ EAT THEM."

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

The dry sticks, as it were, of _The Bale Fire_ (HUTCHINSON) are not very
cunningly laid, with the result that from a spectacular point of view
the conflagration fizzles out rather tamely. But there are so many
bright passages in the book and so many sympathetic sketches of
characters that I cannot help wishing the FRASERS (HUGH and MRS.) had
either written a longer story depending completely on the interplay of
temperament, or else built more carefully on their melodramatic
substructure. For though _Captain Mayhune_, the villain of the piece, is
the proprietor of a gaming-hell and terrorises _Lady Trague_ with a
piece of blotting-paper on which may be read a portion of her letter to
a young man whom she indiscreetly though innocently adores, nothing very
serious comes of his machinations, and our interest in the book is
mainly confined to the emotional relations between _Sir Charles_, a
fussy elderly martinet, his too young wife, and _Maisie_, her
seventeen-year-old step-daughter, who varies from deeper moods to those
of a silly and self-willed child. Then there is _Captain Mayhune_
himself, a man of good impulses and evil, in whom, somehow or other,
though never without a struggle, the evil always triumphs. Other
characters are rather jerkily introduced, amongst whom a family of
good-natured and thoroughly "nice" Americans, who help to straighten
things out and bring people to a better understanding, are most
conspicuous. But that piece of blotting-paper! If I we