Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of travellers--those who do what they are told and those who do what they please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed, wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers of _The Sea and the Jungle_ know. Even in his more English volumes of sketches, essays, confessions, short stories--how is one to describe them?--he takes us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York, and to France in war time. But the English sketches--the description of the crowd at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account of a derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles--almost equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s books are, in this sense, books of discoveries. As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a windy day goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves “with exhilarating undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar on a creeping errand in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day: As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become softened and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.