_Llanyglo_ was a child with fair hair and blue eyes, and how she grew and what she learnt, and all the changes of her dresses and her soul, are set forth by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in _Mushroom Town_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON). She differed from the children of other novelists who grow up to be men and women, because she was made of bricks and mortar and iron girders and romantic scenery and ozone (especially ozone), and the people who lived with her or took trips to see her are treated as a mere emblematical garnish of her character and growth. _Llanyglo_ is a daughter of Wales, but she is not any town that you may happen to have seen, although possibly Blackpool and Douglas and Llandudno have met her, and turned up their noses at her, as she turned up her nose at them. Lancashire built and conquered her, to be conquered and annually recuperated in turn. _Cymria capta ferum_ ... might have been the motto of her municipal arms. Exactly how Mr. ONIONS exhibits the romantic spectacle of her development, with the strange knowledge she picked up, as from virgin wildness she became first select and then popular, I cannot hope to explain. Suffice it to say that the process is epitomised in sketches of the various people who helped in the moulding of her--the drunken _Kerr_ brothers, who built a house in a single night; _Howell Gruffydd_, the wily grocer; _Dafydd Dafis_, the harper; and _John Willie Garden_, son of the shrewd cotton-spinner who first saw the possibilities of the place, and won the heart of the untamed gipsy girl, _Ynys_. This is surely Mr. ONIONS' best novel since _Good Boy Seldom_; and as _Llanyglo_ is safely ensconced on the West coast you should go there at once for the winter season. * * *