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The scene of In Happy Valley (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is laid spiritually, if not strictly geographically, in that part of the continent of America which everybody who has gone to a cinema, hoping against hope, knows so well.  I mean the country where people have “shooting irons” and use them on the slightest provocation to insist that other people shall carry their hands at an absurd and wearisome elevation, and all the men wear fringy trousers, and all the women shawls, save the heroine, who has to be suitably arrayed for the performance of athletic feats.  I admit that I didn’t feel quite at home In Happy Valley, because I missed the sheriff and his posse, and nobody held up the stage-coach; still the young doctor and the school teacher and the ladies at the mission did their best for me, and I found it a great help to know the language, an attainment of which I am justifiably a little vain, for not everyone could translate at sight to “thud” the road or “shoot up” a Christmas party.  Mr. JOHN FOX, Junr., has not placed his largest strawberries—­and some of them are quite nice ones—­at the top of the basket.  His first story did not attract me as much as others further on, such as, for instance, that excellently humorous one, “The Angel from Viper,” though here and in other places a lady called St. Hilda, obviously not she of Whitby, confused me a little.  I fancy that we were supposed to have made her acquaintance in some previous book.  But my real quarrel with Mr. Fox is that he has only given walking-on parts to the actors who do best when such tales are told upon the screen—­I mean the horses.

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When it is granted that books on flying by fliers have at present a peculiar fascination, the fact still remains that what I will call The Library of Aviation has usually been remarkably fortunate in its contributors. Cavalry of the Air (SIMPKIN, MARSHALL) is the last flying work which it has been my good fortune to read, and the only conceivable reason for finding fault with it is that “FLIGHT COMMANDER” occasionally becomes a little facetious.  But when that small complaint is made I have nothing left except praise.  The author was first of all an Observer—­or, as he calls it, a “Shock Absorber”—­in France, and he describes his life so that we groundlings may understand and sympathise with every phase of it.  Especially I like the way in which he pays tribute to the infantry.  In the second part of his book he tells us of his training as a pilot; and here he gives information which deserves to be most thoroughly studied.  The illustrations by Mr. GEOFFREY WATSON add to the charm of this attractive volume.  Of another contribution to the literature of the air which lies before me I cannot speak so well.  Lieut.-Colonel CURTIES has an inventive mind, and in Blake of the R.F.C. (SKEFFINGTON) he uses it unsparingly.