With affectionate humorousness, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town. There is the Jam-pot, who is the nurse; Hamlet, the stray dog; Uncle Samuel, who paints pictures and is altogether "queer"; of course, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and Aunt Amy. Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things. No child will fail to love the birthday in the Cole household, the joyous departure for the sea and the country in the long vacation. "A story of the most human elements, tender, witty, penetrating in a breath. It is the study of one year in a boy’s life.... Mr. Walpole goes straight to the heart of the child for his inspiration, and never strays outside the narrow limits of a child’s experience. It is ’the real thing,’ wonderfully remembered, and most sympathetically and unaffectedly recorded."--_Daily Telegraph_. THE DARK FOREST Out of Russia, where Hugh Walpole had been serving with the Russian Red Cross, came this strange, wonderful, exotic book, containing an inexplicable treasure of beauty,--the glamour of the Russian forest, the scent of blossoming orchards, the wistful heroism of young Russian soldiers. _The Dark Forest_ would be an astonishing performance if only in this--that Walpole has conceived and written a _Russian novel in English_. But there are scenes that are the most vividly realized moments of which Walpole has ever written. Scenes which the _Westminster Gazette_ calls "the equal of the most dramatic passages in English fiction." Mystical, poetical, spiritual, the theme of _The Dark Forest_ is the triumph of the soul over death. One may read in it an allegory of the soul of Russia. "To say that this book is remarkable is only to lay hold on a convenient word as expressive of at least a part of the sensation the story produces. Here is a book for which many of us have dimly waited; a book that transcends the outer facts and reveals the inner significance of war. _The Dark Forest_ is a love story of unusual beauty, as well as a story of war. Who, having read it, will forget this book; at once awful and beautiful? It must be read, for neither quotation nor description is capable of giving more than a bare hint of the nobleness, the intensity of this work of art so deeply rooted in reality."--_New York Times_.