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 cruelties. Unpleasant but well drawn, all of them. Mrs. C. A. DAWSON SCOTT has powerfully suggested the atmosphere of the strange and tragic household, mourning its dead mistress; and she understands the peculiar quality of the Cornish people and the Cornish seas. I have not read her other novels, but, if she will promise to wrestle with one or two rather irritating mannerisms, I will promise to look out for her next one. I have no prejudice against the Wellsian triplet of dots, but really Mrs. Scott does overdo it. And a good deal of her quite penetrating psycho-thingummy was spoiled for me by her trick of conveying nearly every impression and reflection of her characters through an impersonal "you" or "one." This means an economy of words and for a short time a certain vividness, but it soon becomes tedious. One knows what a tangle you get into if one starts using