[Illustration: WITH THE "TELL-TALE FOREST" HUNT.
_The Hobby Rider_ (Mr. CHERRY) takes the temperature of _The Poor Little Rich Girl_ (Miss STEPHANIE BELL).
The hound is Mr. ERNEST HENDRIE _(The Man who makes Faces)_, well-known as _The Dog_ in _The Blue Bird_.]
"After fifty years of good conduct in the Ancona Penitentiary, the life sentence of Giacomo Casale has been remitted by King Victor Emmanuel. Casale's astonishment at the altered world in which he found himself on coming out of prison was unbounded. He immediately"--_Daily Express._
Unfortunately our contemporary stops there, and leaves us all in an agony of doubt. Our own view is that CASALE bought the Mimosa Edition of a certain rival journal, and that the Editor of _The Express_ only just censored the paragraph in time.
"The wireless station at Kamina, in Togo, German West Africa, has received a number of wireless telegrams from the station at Naten, a distance of 3,348 miles. The Kamina station will not be able to reply until its new plant, which is being set up with the utmost speed, has been completed."--_Reuter_.
Indeed, the opinion is held by some that it would be quicker to reply by post.
"The prison buildings themselves are separated from this wall by a yard measuring twenty-five years across."--_Daily Dispatch_.
Of course a yard ought to measure thirty-six inches.
[Illustration: _English Horse Dealer (to Irish horse dealer from whom he is buying a horse)._ "HOW'S HE BRED?"
_Irish Dealer_. "WELL, HOW WOULD YE LIKE HIM BRED? IF HE WAS FOR SIR PATHRICK UP AT THE CASTLE HE'D BE BY RED EAGLE OUT AV AN ASECTIC MARE, BUT YE CAN SUIT YERSILF."]
_(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)_
If for nothing else, Mr. JACK LONDON'S latest story would deserve a welcome for its topicality. In these days of strikes and industrial conflict every one might be glad to know what a writer of his individuality has to say about unions and blacklegs and picketing. True, this is hardly the kind of thing that one has learnt to associate with his name; and for that reason perhaps I best liked _The Valley of the Moon_ (MILLS AND BOON) after its hero and heroine had shaken the unsavoury dust of the town from their feet and set them towards the open country. But much had to happen first. The hero was big _Billy Roberts_, a teamster with the heart of a child and the strength of a prize-fighter--which was in fact his alternative profession. He married _Saxon Brown_ ("a scream of a name" her friend called it when introducing them to each other), and for a time their life together was as nearly idyllic as newly-wedded housekeeping in a mean street could permit it to be. Then came the lean years: strikes and strike-breaking, sabotage and rioting, prison for _Billy_, and all but starvation for _Saxon_. Perhaps you know already that peculiar gift of Mr. JACK LONDON'S that makes you not only see physical hardship but suffer it? I believe that after these chapters the reader of them will never again be able to regard a newspaper report of street-fighting with the same detachment as before, so vivid are they, so haunting. In the end, however, as I say, we find a happier atmosphere. The adventures of _Billy_ and _Saxon_, tramping it in search of a home, soon make their urban terrors seem to them and the reader a kind of nightmare. Here Mr. LONDON is at his delightful best, and his word-pictures of country scenes are as fresh and fine as anything he has yet done. _The Valley of the Moon_, in short, is really two stories--one grim, one pleasant, and both brilliantly successful.
