I've often longed to come upon Some giant spoor and dog the track till I ran to earth a mastodon, A dinosaur, a pterodactyl; But I supposed my natal date-- However distantly I view it-- Was several thousand years too late To give me any chance to do it.
And yet Sir ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Has found a man who's penetrated Through bush and swamp on virgin soil And seen the things I've indicated, Creatures with names that clog your pen-- Dimorphodon and plesiosaurus-- And carried home a specimen To silence any doubting chorus.
In _The Lost World_[A] the tale is told (SMITH, ELDER do it cheap) in diction So circumstantial that its hold Is more than that of common fiction; If you can run the story through, By aid of portraits when you need it, And not be half convinced it's true, You simply don't deserve to read it.
[Footnote A: New Edition, with illustrations.]
There is nothing wrong with Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS' latest collection of short stories, _The Judge's Chair_ (MURRAY), but there is something vigorously to protest against upon the wrapper that covers them. For there I found an uncompromising statement to the effect that these stories "bring to a conclusion the author's Dartmoor work," and no sooner had I read it than my heart sank into my heels. Solemnly I plead with him to reconsider this decision, for if he does not his innumerable admirers will be deprived of something almost as annual and quite as enjoyable as Christmas. If he wants a holiday let him have one by all means, though personally I was not pleased when he left Dartmoor for Italy. But let it be only a holiday, a break in his real business. As for the book, I advise everyone who can appreciate dry humour and quaint philosophy to sit behind _The Judge's Chair_. "The Two Farmers" is in its way a masterpiece, grim and very real, and there is not the ghost of a sign in the whole collection that Mr. PHILLPOTTS has written of Dartmoor until he is tired of it or it of him. He has made a niche for himself in that old temple of Nature, and we must all try to persuade him to stay there.
I have been reading a book, written by the Rev. H. S. PELHAM, and published by MACMILLAN, which is at least twenty times as absorbing and moving as any novel. It is called _The Training of a Working Boy_. I daresay you may have met with other volumes on something like the same theme before, and may suppose you know all about camps and evening schools and blind-alley employment and the rest of it. But I am pretty well sure that you have read nothing more practical and human on the questions of boydom. It is, indeed, the humanity, sympathetic and more than half humorous, of Mr. PELHAM'S attitude that gives his book its appeal and incidentally, I fancy, explains his success with the object of it. His little volume is a plea for personal rather than pecuniary help, and is directed more especially to Midlanders, since its chief concern is with the boy population of Birmingham. I can only wish for it the largest possible number of readers in the shires and elsewhere, since to read it is inevitably to be moved to active sympathy.