Punch, or the London Charivari, page 29 by Various Authors
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yer on Blackpool sands."
From that day till a week ago I never heard Conky or his wife allude to Uncle Joseph. The memory was too painful. And yet it is impossible to deny that the experience was salutary. Marjorie is certainly less overwhelming in her hospitality, and Conky less prodigal of song. And when Conky told me last week that Uncle Joseph had died and left him £10,000, I felt that the old man had atoned handsomely for his unconscious indulgence in a habit for which, after all, a good deal was to be said.
* * * * *
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
The latest of our novelists to succumb to the temptations of the school story is Mr. E. F. BENSON; and I am pleased to add that in David Blaize (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) he seems to have scored a notable success. It is the record of a not specially distinguished, but entirely charming, lad during his career at his private and public schools. Incidentally, as such records must, it becomes the history of certain other boys, two especially, and of David's relations with them. It is this that is the real motive of the book. The friendship between Maddox and David, its dangers and its rewards, seems to me to have been handled with the rarest delicacy and judgment. The hazards of the theme are obvious. There have been books in plenty before now that, essaying to navigate the uncharted seas of schoolboy friendship, have foundered beneath the waves of sloppiness that are so ready to engulph them. The more credit then to Mr. BENSON for bringing his barque triumphantly to harbour. To drop metaphor, the captious or the forgetful may call the whole sentimental--as if one could write about boys and leave out what is the greatest common factor of the race. But the sentiment is never mawkish. There is indeed an atmosphere of clean, fresh-smelling youth about the book that is vastly refreshing. Friendship and games make up the matter of it; there is nothing that