15 OCTOBER 1927, Page 26

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. By Irvin S. Cobb. (Hodder and Stoughton.

7s. 6d.)—A broad American humour, which delights to satirize, not altogether unkindly, the pretensions and the foibles of the half-educated, is the main characteristic of Mr. Cobb's short stories. His incidents are often farcical, as when he narrates the unhappy series of adventures that befall an English novelist visiting an American country town in the course of a lecture tour, or when he describes how a man, nar- rowly escaping from a landslide and allowing himself to be assumed dead, so that he may escape from his normal routine and an uncongenial wife, is finally betrayed by his duplicate set of false teeth. But, however absurd his plots, Mr. Cobb contrives to strike home a shrewd knock or two at human nature.