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[Illustration: _Awe-struck Tommy (from the trenches)._
"LOOK, BILL--SOLDIERS!"]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

It may be as well for me to confess at once the humiliating fact
that I am not, and never have been, an Etonian. If that be a serious
disqualification for life in general, how much more serious must it
be for the particular task of reviewing a book which is of Eton all
compact, a book, for example, like _Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago_,
by A.C. AINGER, with contributions from N.G. LYTTELTON and JOHN MURRAY
(MURRAY). For I have never been "up to" anybody; I have never been
present at "absence"; I have no real understanding of the difference
between a "tutor" and a "dame"; I call a "_p[oe]na_" by the plebeian
name of "imposition"; and, until I had read Mr. AINGERS'S book, I had
never heard of the verb "to brosier" or the noun substantive "bever."
Altogether my condition is most deplorable. Yet there are some
alleviations in my lot, and one of them has been the reading of this
delightful book. I found it most interesting, and can easily imagine
how Etonians will be absorbed in it, for it will revive for them
many an old and joyful memory of the days that are gone. Mr. AINGER
discourses, with a _mitis sapientia_ that is very attractive, on the
fashions and manners of the past and the gradual process of their
development into the Eton of the present. He is proud, as every good