hn_ for whom the members of the _Seneschal_ family persist in
taking him--a twist that makes for piquancy if hardly for added
probability. However, the inevitable solution of the problem provides
a story entertaining enough, though not, I think, one that will
obliterate your memory of others, incomparable, from hands to which we
all owe a debt of long enjoyment.

I read _Inisheeny_ (METHUEN), as I believe I have read every story by
the same hand, at one sitting. Whose was the hand I will ask you to
guess. Characters: one Church of Ireland parson, drily humorous, as
narrator; one lively heroine with archaeological father, hunting for
relics; one schoolboy; one young and over-zealous R.I.C. officer on
the look-out for concealed arms; poachers, innkeepers, peasants, etc.
Action, mostly amphibious, passes between the mainland of Western
Ireland and a small islet off the coast. Will the gentleman who said
"GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM" kindly consider himself entitled to ten nuts?
I suppose it was the mention of an islet that finally gave away my
simple secret. Mr. "BIRMINGHAM" is one of the too few authors who
understand what emotion an island of the proper size and right
distance from the coast can raise in the human breast. _Inisheeny_
delightfully fulfilled every condition in this respect; not to mention
sheltering an illicit still and being the home of Keltic treasure.
Precisely in fact the right kind of place, and the sort of story that
hardly anyone can put down unfinished. I am bound to add that, perhaps
a hundred pages from the actual end, the humour of the affair seems to
lose spontaneity and become forced. But till the real climax of the
tale, the triumphant return of the various hunters from _Inisheeny_, I
can promise that you will find never a dull page.

* * * * *

There were moments in _The Headland_ (HEINEMANN) when, with _Roma
Lennox_, the "companion" and heroine, I "shivered, feeling that
London, compared with the old house on the Headland and the family
inhabiting it, was a clean place with a clear atmosphere and inhabited
by robust, sane, straightforward persons. You felt homesick." Cornwall
is notoriously inhabited by queer people, and the _Pendragon_ family
was not merely queer but hereditarily rotten and decadent: the old
father, who burns a valuable old book of his own to appease his
violent temper; the granddaughter a kleptomaniac; the son of forty
addicted to hideous cruelt