"’What’s that,’ said Mr. Pidgen again. It’s hanging. What the devil!’ "They stopped for a moment, then started across the field. When they had gone a little way Mr. Pidgen paused again. "’It’s like a man with a gold helmet. He’s got legs, he’s coming to us.’ "They walked on again. Then Hugh cried, ’Why, it’s only an old scarecrow. We might have guessed.’ "The sun, at that instant sank behind the hills and the world was grey." It was, visibly, but an old scarecrow, with waving tattered sleeves and a tin can that held the light; but it had been, as well, a man in a golden helmet. He had come toward them. That, in a sentence, expresses Mr. Walpole’s magic: we see the rags and the tin; and we see, too, the heavenly shining; which is the reality he leaves, as he must, for our determining. III In no other novel of Mr. Walpole’s are the forces that--perhaps--lie back of life so explicitly expressed as in The Golden Scarecrow, while, of all his books, The Green Mirror is most frankly concerned with terrestrial existence. It is the second in a plan of three called The Rising City, not, he is careful to inform us, a trilogy. Indeed, English society, in the broad sense, placed in London, is the subject of this series; beyond the introduction in The Green Mirror of a few names made familiar by The Duchess of Wrexe, the novels have no actual intercommunication. They were, however, clearly led up to in other pages, notably Fortitude; but there the dark shapes, like embodied evil passions, were always gathering about the rim of consciousness. But The Green Mirror, except in minor incidences, completely illustrates the spirit in flesh. This it does delightfully with, and this is surprising, a most entertaining humor. Aunt Aggie is one of the old embittered women that Mr. Walpole understands so thoroughly; but, in The Green Mirror, he is more lenient with her than usual. He follows her mind, a mind like the thin scraping jangle of a worn-out music-box, with an amazing flexibility and insight; the latter, in his consideration of Aunt Aggie, predominates. Understanding, of course, dissipates hatred: in the completed picture of ancient maliciousness, positively wicked in intention, the reader is continually cheered by perception of the true, the rare, Comic Spirit. But she, Aunt Aggie, is comparatively unimportant; the weight of The Green Mirror is the imponderable weight of the Trenchard family. They are not aristocrats, such as the late Duchess of Wrexe, or Roddy Seddon; yet Mr. Walpole makes it clear that, essentially, they are more deeply rooted in tradition, in precedent, than a higher and largely frivolous class.