OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

Really I think that _Rhoda Drake_ (MURRAY) must be the most
preposterously startling story that I have read for this age. It makes
you feel as if you had had a squib exploded under your chair at a
temperance meeting. After beginning placidly about persons who live in
South Kensington (and are so dull that the author has to fill up
with minute descriptions of their drawing-rooms), somewhere towards
three-quarters through its decorous course it plunges you head over
ears into such tearing melodrama as is comparable only to Episode 42
of "The Adventures of the Blinking Eye" at a provincial cinema. I
am left asking myself in bewilderment whether Mr. C.H. DUDLEY
WARD, D.S.O., M.C., can have been serious in the affair. As I say,
practically all the early characters are of little or no account,
including _Rhoda_ herself. Indeed, nobody looks like mattering at all,
and the whole tale has, to be frank, taken on a somewhat soporific
aspect, when lo! there enters a lady with a Russian name, no back to
her gown and green face-powder. If I said of this paragon that she
made the story bounce I should still do less than justice to her
amazing personality. Really, she was a herald of revolution, whose
remarkable method was to invite anyone important and obstructive to
her house and make them discontented. It was the work of half-an-hour.
Whether the process was hypnotic, or whether she actually put pepper
in the ice-pudding, I could not clearly make out. But the dreadful
fact remained that, let your patriotism be ever so firm, you had but
to accept one of green-powder's little dinners and next morning you
were as like as not to hurl a stone into 10, Downing Street. As for
the end--! But no, I will stop short of it.