Much of the pleasure that I have just enjoyed over Mr. ARTHUR SYMONS' essays of travel in _Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands_ (COLLINS) belongs to the wistful joy of recollection: remembered loveliness in the beautiful places of which he writes so vividly, remembered peace of the quiet unpreoccupied days in which they were written. The book is made up of three groups, studies of Spain, of London and of certain coasts, chiefly Cornish. For several reasons I found the last interested me most. There is entertainment in watching Mr. SYMONS, so essentially a dweller in cities, discovering the open air like an explorer. You know already his mastery of delicate and sensitive words; many of these pages catch with exquisite skill the subtle charm of the country between land and wave, as it would present itself to a receptive summer visitor rather than the returned native. Mr. SYMONS' similes are essentially urban; the sea (to take an example at random) has for him "something of the colour of absinthe." In fine, though he can and does get into his pages much of the exhilaration of a tramp over heathery cliffs "smelling of honey and sea wind," one retains throughout a not unpleasing consciousness of Paddington. I have left myself too little space to deal adequately with other papers, among which I was delighted to find again that called "Dieppe 1895," long remembered from _The Savoy_ (though here, of course, lacking the interpretation of the BEARDSLEY drawings). Certainly a book to read at leisure and to keep "for further reference," perhaps in a future when travel studies may again become of more than merely sentimental interest. * * * * * Sir ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, on the strength of _Danger! and Other Stories_ (MURRAY), may claim a place among the prophets who were not accepted by their own country. "Danger!"--written some eighteen months before the outbreak of war--foretells the horrors of the unrestricted use of the submarine. In those days Sir ARTHUR could get no one to listen to him, because "in some unfortunate way subjects of national welfare are in this country continually subordinated to party politics." Possibly now that we have been taught by painful experience all we want to know about U-boat warfare, excitement in this tale is rather to seek, but it remains a most successful prophecy. In the last story of the book we have the author in his very worst form. "Three of Them" is a study of children, and the only excuse I can find for it is that it must be intended as a sop to the sentimentalists. Of the others my first vote goes to "The Surgeon of Gaster Fell," and my second to "The Prisoner's' Defence;" but if you are susceptible to Sir ARTHUR'S sense of fun I can also recommend "The Fall of Lord Barrymore" and "One Crowded Hour." Not a great collection, but just good enough. * * * * *