Do not, please, run away with the idea that _The Nursery_ (HEINEMANN) presents us with Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS' views on baby culture. The background of his story, the scenes of which are laid in and around Colchester a year or so ago, is composed of gardens and oyster-beds. On these he gives a lot of information, and, as he could not be pedantic even if he tried to be, I browsed pleasantly upon the store of knowledge set before me. Also I liked the restraint he shows in dealing with the War, and commend his exemplary method to some of our more blatant novelists. When, however, I came to the inhabitants of _The Nursery_ I failed to find in them that rare and delightful quality with which Mr. PHILLPOTTS usually succeeds in endowing his characters. Readers of his novels must know by this time that he is not exactly in love with _Mrs. Grundy_, but here he seems to be insurgent against something, and for the life of me I don't know quite what it is. Perhaps it is insincerity, which is a very good thing to be in rebellion against. There is one very amusing and delightful character, a bibulous old sinner who defied law and order and almost at the last gasp ladled out what he considered justice in a most dramatic manner. His name is _William Ambrose_, and it is worth your while to make his disreputable acqaintance. * * * * * One fact at once awakened in me a fellow-feeling for Mr. BERTRAM SMITH--the discovery of his appreciation (shared by myself, the elder STEVENSON, and other persons of discernment) for the romantic possibilities of the map. There is an excellent map in the beginning of Days of Discovery (CONSTABLE), showing the peculiar domain of childhood, the garden, in terms that will hardly fail to win your sympathy. But not in this alone does Mr. SMITH show that he has the heart of the matter in him; every page of these reminiscences of nursery life proclaims a genuine memory, not a make-believe childhood faked up for literary ends. Who that has once been young can read unstirred by envy the chapter on "Devices and Contrivances," with its entrancing triumph of the chain of mirrors arranged (during the providential absence of those in authority) from the night nursery, down two flights of stairs, to the store-room in the basement? I know a reviewer whom nothing, but moral cowardice restrained from testing the possibility of this delightful plan by personal experiment. Fireworks too--Mr. SMITH has remembered them with a proper regard that is, of course, wholly different from that of those who understand them only in their pyrotechnic aspect, not as objects loved for themselves alone, for their shape and feel, and the glamour of weeks of hoarding and barter. In short, a real nursery book for the study; not one perhaps that actual children would care for (quite possibly they might resent it as betrayal), but one that for the less fortunate will reopen a door of which too many of us have long lost the key.