ism
of the plot he seems very little at his ease; and so marked at times is
his discomfort that I must confess to having felt some irritation when
my willingness to be convinced was not met halfway. In the handling of
his sheets and oars I like the author better, though even here I miss
what might have brought me into a companionship with his people as close
as I could wish on a most adventurous journey of nearly four hundred
pages. But perhaps that is my fault; and, at the least, here is a
straightforward sea story--as honest as the sea and as clean.

* * *

_Llanyglo_ was a child with fair hair and blue eyes, and how she grew
and what she learnt, and all the changes of her dresses and her soul,
are set forth by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in _Mushroom Town_ (HODDER AND
STOUGHTON). She differed from the children of other novelists who grow
up to be men and women, because she was made of bricks and mortar and
iron girders and romantic scenery and ozone (especially ozone), and the
people who lived with her or took trips to see her are treated as a mere
emblematical garnish of her character and growth. _Llanyglo_ is a
daughter of Wales, but she is not any town that you may happen to have
seen, although possibly Blackpool and Douglas and Llandudno have met
her, and turned up their noses at her, as she turned up her nose at
them. Lancashire built and conquered her, to be conquered and annually
recuperated in turn. _Cymria capta ferum_ ... might have been the motto
of her municipal arms. Exactly how Mr. ONIONS exhibits the romantic
spectacle of her development, with the strange knowledge she picked up,
as from virgin wildness she became first select and then popular, I
cannot hope to explain. Suffice it to say that the process is epitomised
in sketches of the various people who helped in the moulding of her--the
drunken _Kerr_ brothers, who built a house in a single night; _Howell
Gruffydd_, the wily grocer; _Dafydd Dafis_, the harper; and _John Willie
Garden_, son of the shrewd cotton-spinner who first saw the
possibilities of the place, and won the heart of the untamed gipsy girl,
_Ynys_. This is surely Mr. ONIONS' best novel since _Good Boy Seldom_;
and as _Llanyglo_ is safely ensconced on the West coast you should go
there at once for the winter season.

* * *

_Spragge's Canyon_ (SMITH, ELDER), takes its title, as you might guess,
from the canyon where the _Spragges_ lived. It was a delightful spot, a
kind of e