however, that "Passed by Censor" was only a guarantee for the
harmlessness and not for the veracity of the stories narrated; and in
particular that the famous "Q"-boat ruse of the demented female with the
explosive baby was a pure work of imagination.

* * * * *

Without any special heralding, Mr. ERIC LEADBITTER seems to have stepped
into the front rank, perhaps even to the leadership, of those active
novelists whose theme is English rural life. I emphasize the word "active,"
with of course a thought for the master of them all, the wizard of
Dorchester, at whose feet it would probably be fair to suppose Mr.
LEADBITTER to have learnt some at least of his craft. His new story,
_Shepherd's Warning_ (ALLEN AND UNWIN), is a quiet tale of life in a not
specially attractive village--a tale that conquers by its direct humanity
and by an art so delicate and so deftly concealed that the book has a
deceptive appearance of having written itself without effort on the part of
its author. It concerns a group of peasants, agricultural labourers,
inhabitants of Fidding, a village gradually yielding to the encroachments
by tram and villa of the neighbouring town. The simple annals of these
folk, and especially of one family, old _Bob Garrett_ and his grandsons,
provide the matter of a tale gentle as the passage of time itself, never
dull, instinct with quality in every line of it. Mr. LEADBITTER has a
method of concentration so pronounced that, once let his characters, even
his heroine, step outside the beam that he has focussed upon Fidding, and
they vanish utterly, till the working (apparently) of fate brings them back
again. Even the murder in his early chapters is so lightly touched upon as
to produce hardly any effect of violence. His sympathy with the life of the
soil, and the human lives that are so near to it, is clearly absorbing; the
result is that, to all save the confirmed sensationalist (piqued possibly
by the waste of good homicide), _Shepherd's Warning_ will also, I think,
prove Reader's Delight.

* * * * *

Mr. H. COLLINSON OWEN, formerly Editor of the soldiers' paper, _The Balkan
News_, would just love to trap you into an argument on the value of our
Macedonian campaign as compared with certain other war efforts. His book,
_Salonika and After_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), shows him thirsting to accept
battle for the cause he champions; and in the sub-title, _The