Just Forty Winks. By Hamish Hendry. (Blackie and Son.)— This
is a delightful and genuinely—if here and there too ambitiously—comic book. Davie Trot, confined to the (home) school-room because be has tickled Elsie during the Bible lesson, escapes into the congenial region of dreamland, where, with the help of comic mice, comic dogs, comic cows, and Mr. Hamish Hendry, he has what is popularly known as "a high old time of it." Through Davie, Mr. Hendry is enabled to make fun of the golf craze and a number of the other popular enthusiasms of the day. Occasionally this fun does not appear specially spontaneous, but has an artificial panto- mime look. Thus when Davie asks old King Cole what his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Simple Simon, does with his pennies, he replies—to the gallery—in this fashion : "The last penny he had was put on the Income-tax, and it stuck so fast that he has never been able te get it off again." We have perhaps rather too many jokes of this kind and quality, and too many bad puns of the sort that occur to adults and not to children. These are, on the whole, however, but small blemishes. Just Forty Winks is full of high spirits and most excellent invention. We have not heard before of the name of the author, Mr. Hamish Hendry, as a purveyor of literature for children. But he in certain to be heard of in the future.
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