* * * * *

I feel that Miss MARGARET SYMONDS had a purpose in writing _A Child of
the Alps_ (FISHER UNWIN), but, unless it was to show how mistaken
it is, as _Basil_, the Swiss farmer, puts it, "to think when thou
shouldst have been living," it has evaded me. The book begins with a
romantic marriage between an Englishwoman of some breeding and a Swiss
peasant who is a doctor, and tells the history of their daughter until
she is about to marry _Basil_, her original sweetheart. I cannot be
more definite or tell you how her first marriage--with an English
cousin--turned out, because _Linda's_ own account of this is all
we get, and that is somewhat vague. A great many descriptions of
beautiful scenery, Swiss and Italian, come into the book, and a great
many people, some of them very individual and lifelike; but the
author's concentration on _Linda_ gives them, people and scenery
alike, an unreal and irritating effect of having been called into
being solely to influence her heroine, and that lessens their
fascination. Yet it is a book which makes a distinct impression, and
once read will not easily be forgotten. It seems a strange comment to
make on a new volume of a "First Novel Library," but _A Child of
the Alps_, as you will realise if you have been reading novels long
enough, is almost exactly the sort of book its title would have
suggested had it appeared thirty years ago.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Prospective Employer._ "HOW OLD ARE YOU?" _Applicant
for Post._ "FOURTEEN--AND UNMARRIED."]

* * * * *

These wrapper-artists should really exercise a little more discretion.
To depict on the outside of a book the facsimile of a cheque for ten
thousand pounds might well be to excite in some readers a mood of
wistfulness only too apt to interfere with their appreciation of the
contents. Fortunately, _Uncle Simon_ (HUTCHINSON) is a story quite
cheery enough even to banish reflections on the Profiteer. A
middle-aged and ultra-respectable London solicitor, whose thwarted
youth periodically awakes in him and insists upon his indulging all
those follies that should have been safely finished forty-odd years
before--here, you will admit, is a figure simply bursting with every
kind of possibility. Fortunately, moreover, MARGARET and H. DE VERE
STACPOOLE have shown themselves not only fully alive to all the
humorous chances of their the