Hornung Ernest William - Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front стр 32.

If only it had been earlier in the season, not the very hush before the hurricane! There were so many lives and works that we were going to thresh out together Francis Thompson's, for one. He had crept into our evening with Edgar Allan Poe. I had promised them a long evening with Francis; the stretcher-bearers, especially, were looking forward to it as much as I was; but I had to send for the books, and they were not in time.

And on the last of these Quiet Room Evenings, a young lad in a Line regiment had stayed behind and said:

'May we have a lecture on Sir John Ruskin, sir?'

I said of course they might but I was not competent to deliver it myself. His books were on the way, however, for there had been more than one inquiry for them. They also arrived too late.

I had never seen the boy before, nor did I again. I may this winter. He shall have his 'lecture on Sir John Ruskin' if I have to get it up myself!

WRITERS AND READERS

Statistics, however, are notoriously bad witnesses; and some of mine would not stand cross-examination. Thus, take him for all in all, the author of The First Hundred Thousand

may add the blue ribbon of the Rest Hut to his collection; but then, we had practically all his books, and some of them four or five deep. Nor was the one that had more outings than anything of anybody's on our shelves on that account the most popular; it may even have been the author's nearest approach to a bad penny. On the other hand, our four copies of The First Hundred Thousand were out almost as long as we were open, and all four 'failed to return.' As for its sequel, our only copy eloped with its first partner: had all our authors been Ian Hays there would have been no carrying on the library after the first hundred thousand seconds.

The run on these two books was the more noteworthy in view of the fighting reader's distaste for 'shop.' It was the flattering exception to a very human rule; for I find, taking a good many days at random, that while all but thirteen of every hundred issues were novels, less than three of the thirteen were books about the war. Some forty-nine readers out of fifty wanted something that would take them out of khaki, and nearly nine out of ten pinned their faith to fiction.

How many preferred a really good novel is another and a more invidious matter; but nothing was more refreshing than the way the older masters held their own. Dickens was in constant demand, especially among the older men; and they really read him, judging by the days the immortal works stayed out. Again, it was worth noting that here in France A Tale of Two Cities had twice as many readers as Pickwick , which came next in order of popularity. Thackeray was not fully represented, but we had all his best and they were always out. Of the Brontës we had next to nothing, of Reade and Trollope far too little; but It is Never too Late to Mend enchanted a Sapper, a Machine Gunner, and a Red Cross man in turn, while Orley Farm would have headed our first day's list had it been there in time. George Eliot was never without readers, but Miss Braddon had more, and The Woman in White only one! After Dickens, however, the most popular Victorian was the first Lord Lytton.

I confess it rejoiced my heart to hand out the protagonists of a belittled age at least as freely as their 'opposite numbers' of the present century. But I had my surprises. Scott (Sir Walter!) was a firm wall-flower for the first fortnight; probably the Jocks knew him off by heart; and, of course, the same thing may apply to their unnatural neglect of the so-called Kaleyard School of other days. There was, at any rate, nothing clannish about their reading. It was a Jock who took The Unspeakable Scot for its only airing; and more than three-fourths of my Stevensonians were Sassenachs. But one could still conjure with the name of Stevenson, as with many another made in his time. Mr. Kipling's soldiers are adored by legions created in their image. Sir H. Rider Haggard was never on the Rest House shelf. Messrs. Holmes and Watson were the most flourishing of old firms, and Gerard the only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter. Ruritania, too, got back some of its own trippers from the Five Towns; for though you would have thought there was adventure enough in the air we breathed, there was more realism, and it was against the realism we all reacted. Mr. Bennett, to be sure, did not occupy nearly enough space in our capricious catalogue; neither, for that matter, did Mr. Weyman, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Vachell, nor yet Miss Marie Corelli or Sir Thomas Hall Caine. The fault was not mine, I can assure them.

Mr. H. G. Wells, on the other hand, utilised a better chance by tying with the author of Arsène Lupin , and just beating Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, for a place it would be unprofitable to compute. Even they could not live the pace of Mr. Charles Garvice, who in his turn succumbed to the lady styled the Baroness Horsy by her fondest slaves; to these two and to Miss Ethel Dell, among others I have or have not presumed to mention, I could wish no greater joy than my job at that counter when their books were coming in, and 'another by the same author, if you've got one,' being urgently demanded in their place. The most enthusiastic letter ever written for an autograph could not touch the eager tone, the live eye, the parted lips of those unconscious tributes. It is not the look you see in Mudie's as you wait your turn; but I have seen it in small boys chasing pirates with 'Ballantyne the Brave,' and in one old lady who fell in love every Sunday of her dear life with the hero of The Family Herald Supplement . It was even better worth seeing in a soldier with Just a Girl