The name of Mrs. BELLOC LOWNDES on the outside would alone have made me open _From the Vasty Deep_ (HUTCHINSON) with a pleasant anticipation of creepiness, even without the generous measure of bogies depicted on the coloured wrapper. Having now read the story, I am bound to add (and I can only hope that Mrs. LOWNDES will take my admission for the compliment that it really is) that the net result has been one of slight disappointment. Briefly, I continue to prefer the writer as a criminal, rather than a psychic, "Fat Boy." After all, once grant your ghost and anyone can conjure it, with appropriate circumstance, at the proper moments. Wyndfell Hall was full enough of ghosts, all ready to appear at the voluntary or involuntary instance of a young lady named _Bubbles_, who was one of the Christmas house-party and the owner of a rather uncomfortable gift of spook-raising. But beyond making themselves an occasional nuisance to the guests I couldn't find that the phantoms did anything practical to help along such plot as there was. Even the quite palpable fact that the host was at least a double murderer came to proof by the ordinary process of law rather than by any supernatural revelation. Before this I have gratefully owed to Mrs. LOWNDES the raising of my remaining hairs like quills upon the fretful porcupine, but the ca'-canny bogies of her present story are too perfunctory to excuse even a shiver in any but the most unsophisticated reader. * * * It may, I suppose, be accounted for righteousness to Major-General Sir ARCHIBALD ANSON that in _About Others and Myself_ (MURRAY) he is so little of an egotist as to convey scarcely any impression of what manner of man he is or what he thinks of this or that. Much more clear from her quoted letters is the character of his grandmother, who vainly tried to keep the over-gallant First Gentleman of Europe out of mischief. Our autobiographer gives us a plain, blunt, not to say bald record of what must have been an interesting life. He was at Eton under KEATE; a cadet at Woolwich, where he saw a gunner receive two hundred lashes; a gunnery subaltern in the Crimea, where he saw many queer and unedifying things; a successful administrator in Madagascar, Mauritius and Penang, and finally Governor of the Straits Settlements, with a K.C.M.G. and honourable retirement to follow. But he is a man of action rather than words, and his faculty of observation is but too often exercised upon such slender matters as that "Poor Captain Powlett met with a misfortune on the way to Kedah. His servant laid the dinner things on the deck of the gunboat, then went below for something and, coming up again, accidentally walked into the middle of the crockery and glass, causing considerable destruction." Also, I think he quotes his testimonials--those never very candid and always very dull documents--much too freely. The best of the book is concerned with his