ded.

* * * * *

The scene of _In Happy Valley_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is laid
spiritually, if not strictly geographically, in that part of the
continent of America which everybody who has gone to a cinema, hoping
against hope, knows so well. I mean the country where people have
"shooting irons" and use them on the slightest provocation to insist
that other people shall carry their hands at an absurd and wearisome
elevation, and all the men wear fringy trousers, and all the women
shawls, save the heroine, who has to be suitably arrayed for the
performance of athletic feats. I admit that I didn't feel quite at
home _In Happy Valley_, because I missed the sheriff and his posse,
and nobody held up the stage-coach; still the young doctor and the
school teacher and the ladies at the mission did their best for me,
and I found it a great help to know the language, an attainment of
which I am justifiably a little vain, for not everyone could translate
at sight to "thud" the road or "shoot up" a Christmas party. Mr. JOHN
FOX, Junr., has not placed his largest strawberries--and some of them
are quite nice ones--at the top of the basket. His first story did not
attract me as much as others further on, such as, for instance, that
excellently humorous one, "The Angel from Viper," though here and in
other places a lady called _St. Hilda_, obviously not she of Whitby,
confused me a little. I fancy that we were supposed to have made her
acquaintance in some previous book. But my real quarrel with Mr. Fox
is that he has only given walking-on parts to the actors who do best
when such tales are told upon the screen--I mean the horses.

* * * * *

When it is granted that books on flying by fliers have at present a
peculiar fascination, the fact still remains that what I will call
The Library of Aviation has usually been remarkably fortunate in its
contributors. _Cavalry of the Air_ (SIMPKIN, MARSHALL) is the last
flying work which it has been my good fortune to read, and the
only conceivable reason for finding fault with it is that "FLIGHT
COMMANDER" occasionally becomes a little facetious. But when that
small complaint is made I have nothing left except praise. The
author was first of all an Observer--or, as he calls it, a "Shock
Absorber"--in France, and he describes his life so that we groundlings
may understand and sympathise with every phase of it. Especially I
like th