Miss Edith Dart has grouped against her Dartmoor setting in Sareel (Philip Allan) just the characters to act out the well-worn story of the mutual infatuation of a young man of birth and an ignorant country maid. But though Sareel, the little workhouse-reared servant at the farm, falls in love in the accepted fashion with the best-looking of the three young men who lodge there on a reading tour, and though he duly falls in love with her, the innocence of her soul keeps their passion on the highest plane. What is more, when Alan, as such young gentlemen in fiction generally do, changes his mind Miss Dart provides a happy ending, without even a suicide to spoil it, and without inconsistency either in her own point of view or in that of her characters. I don't really believe that Devonshire people say that they like things "brave and well" quite as often as Miss Dart makes hers, and I wish she had not so great a fondness for the word "such" that she must invent phrases as weird as "though he had not sought such" in order to bring it in; but apart from these trifles Sareel, as something like a feminine version of a book by Mr. Eden Phillpotts arranged for family reading, will certainly please a great many people.
If you would like to see a white lady ride on a white horse to Banbury Cross and elsewhere with a body-guard of men in tin hats, carrying The Banner (Collins) and proclaiming the League of Youth (against war and other evils) and forcible retirement from all offices of profit or power under the Crown at the age of forty, get Mr. Hugh F. Spender's new and, as it seems to me, rather ingenuous novel. Love is not neglected, for a peer's son, deaf and dumb through shell-shock, so responds to the counter-irritant of seeing this modern Joan riding through Piccadilly that he recovers both speech and hearing and promptly uses them to put her a leading question and understand her version of "But this is so sudden. However——" There is a people's army; a rose-water revolution with the King accepting it as all in the day's dull work; a fight or rather an arming of a few last-ditchers of the old order, and much else that is not likely to happen outside Ruritania. Also candid expression of the opinions of (I take it) the "Wee Frees" concerning Glamorgan Jones.
If Mr. Alan Graham does not unsettle my conviction that it is easier to begin a story of hidden treasure than it is to finish it, I can nevertheless promise you a good day with the sleuth-hounds, should you decide to Follow the Little Pictures (Blackwood). For some not too lucid reason I went to the meet with a fear in my heart that the command in the title referred to the "movies," and my relief was great on discovering that it was taken from a cipher containing the key to the treasure. The scene of this hunt is laid in Scotland, and the most notable figure among its followers is a certain Laird Tanish. The pecuniary fortunes of the Tanish clan were at a low ebb, and in his determination to improve them by winning the prize the Laird broke all the rules of the game and gave way to terrific outbursts of rage in the manner of those explosive gentlemen with whom Miss Ethel Dell has familiarised us. There is both ingenuity and originality in this story, and I should be doing the author and his readers a great disservice if I disclosed the details of the plot. Anyone with a bent for treasure-hunting will be missing a fine opportunity if he refuses to have a day (or a night) with Mr. Graham's hounds.
Mistress. "Norah, do you ever repeat anything you hear the master and myself say to each other when we have a slight difference of opinion?"
Domestic. "The Saints forbid, Mum!"