This has always been a healthy district, and so very quiet that people had no worries; and they usually lived on till a great age. I have heard it said regretfully, “Ah, her died young,” and then heard it explained, “Her ne’er saw sixty.” Times are changing now. Looking at the tombstones of some kindred of my own, I was observing how the ages fell from nineties and eighties to seventies and sixties. I said nothing aloud, but the sexton read my thoughts and put them into words, “Aye, zir, they do say as each generation be weaker and wiser than the last.” * * * * * _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND FIRST SERIES Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 8_s._ net. “Mr Torr chats to us. We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire while he turns through his grandfather’s and his father’s letters and reads us little extracts, and lets his talk wander as it will from suggestion to suggestion.... A quaint ingenuity and originality of idea plays about it all: a sly wit flashes here and there. But always, behind everything, we feel Wreyland, the Devon home, the rooted life. We should like to give some examples; but choosing them is as difficult as choosing raspberries when all are ripe; for, in the classic phrase of the reviewer, there is not a dull page in Mr Torr’s book. We confess to skipping a single paragraph. On turning back to read it we found that we had missed a fragrant bit of social history.... As to good stories, open any page that you will and you will find one.... The only point of capping a good talker’s stories is to egg him on to tell more. We hope that Mr Torr will take the hint.”--_Times Literary Supplement._ “He has travelled far afield in Europe, and he comes back to Wreyland and dips into his grandfather’s and his father’s letters, and his own memory as well, and tells us what he thinks of things that were and are. And what we like is the easy balance of his mind. The old times were not always the good times, and modern days are not altogether bad; so Mr Torr has taken each as it has come, and has been content therewith.”--_Morning Post._ “Wreyland is Mr Torr’s home near Dartmoor, and his book gives us a sort of comic mirror of life at Wreyland during his own life and the life of his grandfather. For Mr Torr sees life comically as surely as Jane Austen herself.... It would be difficult, indeed, to define the reasons of its astonishing attractiveness. Probably one of them is that Mr Torr was born with a genius for enjoyment, and that he somehow infects us with his happiness in his most trivial pages.”--_Daily News._