A. G, Strong. naturalists and Mr. L. A.
10 exception to the rul more of "Lorna Doone" fame taught us how to tickle trout (or whata over the favourite fish of "gurt Jan Rida" was) and here we find Me. Strong displaying an intimate knowledge of the birds and beasts of the Devon countryside. Tis descriptions of boys' bird-nesting expeditions could only have been written by one who has memory of his boys have written the chapters dose the carly life of Dick Brendan and Bue which thi opens.
The -book is bound to find many friends, if arnly for its stark and pare English—o stark that it bo-conies at times even coarse: but the coarseness is considerably smoothed ty the pleasant lilt of Devonshire [dintect bringing with it the smell \of peat and all the health-giving breezes of the open moors.
is indeeed a pteasint change to find a novel which depends little (if at all) on a complicated plot, but resolves itself rather into a series of well considered character studies. The placid minded reader will like best the earlier chapters and may well picture the author as careful student of Dickens: here we have a Super-Do-The-Boys-Hall of which the presiding genius is a queer mixture of Squeers and Micawber with a heavy coating of culture on the top: a stationer who might have stepped cut of the rages of David Copperfield: and last but not least, a character, tart Dickens and part Barrie wi strangely remind memory of the reader, all." modern novelists, always excepting the energetic Edgar Wallace and his kind, depend for their thrill on sex, and the accepted method of serving the dish is by means of the eternal triangle: in the later parts of this book we find sex served up in lavish quantities but by the more brutal methods of the farm-yard: thus we get an almost barbaric picture of rural English life such as our fathers may have known. We know that religious thought played a. very large part in the life of rural Eng-wu, Dut it does seem a pity that thinking writers cannot accent wha! we call "religion" as a code of Inws made to deal with that part of our fe which enenot be meneured in terms of earthly gain or loss: such a simple theory would make it quite unnecessary to enter into the very wordy arguments which Mr. Strong 10 the mouths of his other-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.