the heart of man.

CRICKET NOTES.

Mr. P.F. Warner has received countless expressions of regret on his retirement from first-class cricket. Among these he values not least a "round robin" from the sparrows at Lord's, all of whom he knows by name. In the score-book of Fate is this entry in letters of gold:

Long may he live to enjoy the cricket of others!

The test team of Australia being now complete, all correspondence on the subject of its exclusions must cease. We therefore do not print a number of letters asking why there is no one named Geddes on the side.

Mr. Fender and Hobbs are said to be actuated by the same motto, "For Hearth and Home." Both are pledged to return covered with "the ashes."

In the recent Surrey and Middlesex match Mr. Skeet bewildered the crowd by fielding as if he liked it. Hitherto this vulgar manifestation has been confined to Hitch and Hendren.

Although so late in the season Yorkshire has great hopes of a colt named Hirst, who has just joined the side. He was seen bowling at Eton and was secured at once.

There is a strong feeling in Worcestershire that a single-wicket match between Lee of Middlesex and Mr. Perrin of Essex would be a very saucy affair.

AT THE PLAY.

"The Unknown."

Mr. Somerset Maugham, who recently intrigued and perhaps just a little scandalised the town with a most engagingly flippant and piquant farce all about an accidentally bigamous beauty, certainly shows courage in launching so serious a discussion as The Unknown. And in the silly season too. I see that in a quite unlikely interview (but then all modern interviews are unlikely) he defends his right to discuss religion quite openly on the stage. Of course. Why should anybody deny that religion is to the normally constituted mind, whatever its doxy, an absorbingly interesting subject; or that the War hasn't made a breach in the barriers of British reticence? Whether to the point of making a perfectly good married Vicar (anxious to convict a doubting D.S.O. of sin) ask in a full drawing-room containing the Vicaress, the Doctor and the D.S.O.'s fiancée, mother and father, "For instance, have you always been perfectly chaste?"—I am not so sure. Nor whether the War has really added to bereaved Mrs. Littlewood's bitter "And who is going to forgive God?" any added force. If that kind of question is to be asked at all it might have been asked, and with perhaps more justice, at any time within the historical period. For the War might reasonably be attributed by the Unknown Defendant thus starkly put upon trial to man's deliberate folly, whereas....

No doubt, however, Mr. Maugham would say the shock of war has (like any other great catastrophe) tested the faith of many who are personally deeply stricken and found it wanting, while the whisper of doubt has