I should have liked GABRIELLE VALLINGS' _Tumult_ (HUTCHINSON) a good deal better if she could have managed it without the aid of a Pan who wandered, emitting a strong smell, chiefly in the demesne of a very expensive and over-cultivated French noble. It was his daughter (by an Australian wife) who was suffering from an inordinate perplexity as to which half of her blood had the real call. The Australian half suggested that she should marry a gentleman-rider who won the Grand Prix in a canter, but fell at the winning-post because his horse shied at the irrepressible Pan. The French half--and both her parents--urged a dissolute and anaemic aristocrat--blue blood and a gold lining. Her grandfather, a strong unsilent sheep-rancher, was against this inept decadent and converted to his view that saintly worldling, the gorgeous _Cardinal Camperioni_. A neo-futurist of the most bizarre type prances through the pages upon his head, causing enough "tumult" to satisfy any one. So why drag in Pan? Miss VALLINGS can tell a story, cannot keep down the volume of her puppets' talk, has a sense of movement and colour, and ought to win for herself a good circulating library constituency. * * * * * For myself I have never yet lived in a sailing barge, and under the providence of Heaven trust to continue in this immunity. There are however those who regard the matter differently; and for their benefit I have no hesitation in recommending most warmly _A Floating Home_ (CHATTO AND WINDUS), written by CYRIL IONIDES and J.B. ATKINS, and illustrated partly with photographs, partly with water-colour sketches by that various craftsman, Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT. Let me say at once that you have no need to be an amateur bargee, either by practice or desire, to enjoy this most entertaining volume. Witness my own case, who read every page of it with delight. It is a reasonable contention that a writer possessing the enthusiasm, the humour and the persuasive gifts of Mr. IONIDES, with a twelve-and-sixpenny book for their display, could present a case that would give some theoretic and superficial charm to the most uncomfortable conditions of existence. Not that _A Floating Home_ is a work only of theory; on the contrary, nothing could be more practical than its account of the purchase, conversion and enjoyment of the _Ark Royal_. The most prejudiced--again I speak personally--will find pleasure in the author's zestful story of how the dingy, foul-smelling _Will Arding_, full of cement (and worse things), was transformed into the spick-and-span _Ark Royal_, with a piano in the saloon and Queen Anne silver on the breakfast-table; while for the persuadable there are added plans, scales of expense and the like, which bring the whole matter to a working basis. The book, in short, is propaganda at its best (was it perhaps this that attracted Mr. BENNETT?) and as such well entitled to its toll of converts. * * * * *