CAPITALIZING on the new wave of interest in The Scarlet Pimpernel evoked by a Hollywood adaptation of Baroness Orczy's novel, Mr. Blakeney presents what is supposed to be the accurate story of his life and exploits. Mr. Blakeney's Scarlet Pimpernel is so much like the novelized personage that the book is hardly worth the trouble he took in filling in missing gaps and adding all sorts of anecdotes. It is not stated that the author is a descendant of the illustrious Blakeney's; indeed, his extreme adulation of them all would prove a bit nauseating if one knew him to be a relative.

The pedigree of "that demmed elusive Pimpernel" is traced back five generations to the "Laughing Cavalier" whom Franz Hals painted, a Dutch vagabond and swaggerer, son of the merchant John Blake of Blakeney and a young Haarlem girl, Philippina. Percy's early life is described, and later the important part which he played in heckling the French Revolutionists. The first indication that the author's Percy Blakeney is going to turn out to be just what movie-goers of today think him, comes in the narrative during Percy's first day at Harrow, in his twelfth year.

"That evening he should have undergone the inevitable and usually extremely unpleasant initiation at the hands of his elders, but, deeming that a policy of aggression was to be preferred to one of passivity, he came to the conclusion that it would be better to pick a quarrel than to have one forced upon him. He therefore strode up to Bathurst, the biggest and most powerful in the room, and scrutinized the latter's clothes in obvious and undisguised scorn.

"What a disgusting fit!" he said coolly. "Really, Bathurst, you must permit me to introduce you to my tailor. Just look at that demmed seam."

"And he ripped the other boy's beautiful velvet coat from tail to collar. The other two stood aghast and gasped at the impudence, but its show put a temporary stop to the processes of initiation and the night passed off fairly comfortably for the new boy."

Even more incredible than this story, however, is the portrait of the Scarlet Pimpernel as a boy of eleven years old, "from a contemporary silver point drawing." With an air of the greatest insouciance young Percy stands in his tailcoat, ruff, and knee breeches, his left hand daintily grasping the well known handkerchief, his right elevating some sort of lorgnette or bauble which is not clearly distinguishable, and looking for all the world exactly as he did at twenty and at thirty and at forty.