What enticing headings for her chapters Miss Fox Smith has chosen for this new book of hers! Ship Models—A Bit of Old Limehouse—
Fascination of Charts; enough for book in wny one of them. One could go on for a long time with the kind of inns which sailors fre-~Jquent, the inns found in what has been called "the squalid littoral of the world"; and the inns there, too, which used to know sailors" but know them no more, unless they enjoy egcoa. The inns of Dunkirk, Havre, Cardiff, Buenos Ayres, Wapping, Liverpool, and Rotter-Jdam, past-arid present—but it is no good talking; we shall never have a book about them, though if it were well done it would bestow jon our old coaching inns the idemureness of temperance hotels.
There can be no doubt whatever about Miss Fox Smith's genuine love for the foreshore of London: for any foreshore. Nobody but jan extremely unusual traveller would alight from a bus m the Commercial road, E., and walk thence to Stapny Church, It is all very well, If the bones of your forbears late in Stepney Churchyard, to moon, \nbout such an obscure parish; but perhaps thay is what is the matter with Miss Fox Smith. That is why she happens to know where to find the manorial tablet to Joseph Somes, Esquire, and where the builder the "Harry Grace a Dien" was buried. "She calls Stepney Church the cathedral of dockland; and. it is, of course; either that, or the parish church of all homeless souls at sea. And who was Somes, any-*|how, lots of people will ask?"
The author of "Ship Alley" knows, and is ju remembers 'a good deal that most of us have forgation, if we ever know it; she remembers it accurately, in' detail, Jand with affection, The retrospective London author who does no: brood over the pigeons abou, the fountain in the Temple, for feed the ravens at the Tower, but somehow finds her way to the navigating room of a steamer in the Surrey Commercial Dock, fat least unusual. And in" that room she dreams over charts, which naturally are heaps better than maps; she enumerates the marks of the Thames estuary as though they formed an incantation designed to transport the soul to a better world; fund verne of them really are queer too; bu! it ix necessary to have seen from shipboard, inthe chill of the dawn, an eye winking from xibber in the waste, to remember the name of it afterwards with a feeling of uwe. Perhaps the incan-jon hus no magic for those who 5 [lo mor "know the names. "Ferbane there is no magic in a name unless it implex something not easily explained.
And where in the world has Miss Fox Smith not been? She will jeasually refer to Singapore, when idling through Wapping, or Vancouver, or Sydney, or some other point "down under or far over. This is all very fine. We can assure her we want to know more about it, "She reminds us thay "the worst Jof what are journalistically enllod real life stories' is that they are seldom really complete. They often have beginnings; less often, they have ends, and sometimes they have mere middles. But they never—or hardly ever—round themselves noutly off like story-book happenings—turning up all the gear, w to speak, and putting a mousing on the Cliphooks." Putting a Mousing on the cliphooks! But of course not. That is never done in a good story, but only in common novels, made to sell. It is evident, from this book, that Miss Fox Smith knows many of those stories which begin nowhere and end abruptly just when we feel that the world has become very rum.
We want to hear them. She must know more Ship Alleys than are mentioned in"this book.—"Observer. did it, and did it with a discretion, sense of humour, a pleasant can-Jdour that marks her out as a very jold-fashioned heroine indeed. The subject ig sentimental, but. Mr, Bryce Keeps the sentiment always jin Jane's half-bantering key. The result is extremely satisfying, that the means and the end wroly handled. A quiet efficiency and a charm that is Jane's own, well-bred charm give the hook ite distinction,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.