nd carries it to the triumphant end.
When, by reason of his wounds, he had to leave the Front and work in
London and elsewhere, he naturally lost touch with the real business
of the battle; even after his return to the Front in April, 1918, his
letters lack their original sense of actuality, and I, reading them,
began to wonder if he was ever going to recover his former style.
Happily he does so, and with his letter of July 11th he gives a
striking picture of a terrible incident of war, of which I don't
remember to have read before, but, as I read it now, I seem to be
witnessing it myself. From this point on he steadily develops his
best, so that he ends on a fitting climax to all his writings of the
War in his long final letter of October 6th--propaganda unashamed.
The book should be thrust under the noses of those pacifists who now
labour to minimise the past and to magnify the virtue and the value of
their personal loving-kindness.

* * * * *

It has ever been my misfortune that the presence in a story of two
characters confusably alike, or a setting within drowning distance
of a tide-race, will produce in me an almost insuperable sense of its
having been "made on purpose." I had therefore a double stroke of bad
luck in finding both these elements present in _The Splendid Fairing_
(MILLS AND BOON). But the more credit to Miss CONSTANCE HOLME that,
despite my increasing conviction that the wrong prodigal would return,
and that the powers of nature were throughout almost visibly preparing
to engulf him, the gentle and unforced power of her story did hold my
attention till the final wave. Distinction shown in apparent absence
of effort would, I think, be my verdict on her writing; she clearly
knows her Northern farmer-folk with the sympathy of intimate
experience. I hope I have not already suggested too much of the plot,
a little tragedy of the commonplace dealing with the relations between
two farming brothers, of whom the younger prospers while the elder
fails, and the life-long jealousies of their women. Miss HOLME works,
one may say, on a minute scale; the short but simple annals of the
poor interest her to the extent of providing an entire volume of three
hundred odd pages from the events of a single day. But though now and
then the old Northern counsel to "get eendways wi' it" does hover in
the background of one's mind I repeat that sincerity carries the thing
through. For all that