My landlady assures me that His Daughter (COLLINS) is a “lovely story,” and I think it only right that Mr. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS should have the benefit of her criticism, since my own is distinctly less favourable.  Mr. MORRIS showed signs at one time of being able to write a first-class novel of adventure, but he abandoned this field for a more lucrative appeal to the Great American Bosom, whose taste, if I may say so without endangering the League of Nations, is more in harmony with my landlady’s than with mine.  His latest hero is one of those magnificent fellows whom no woman can resist—­or so they tell him.  Anyway he is irresistible enough to have two daughters, one born in lawful wedlock, the other—­of whose existence he is unaware for a long time—­in Paris.  Which of the daughters is the one referred to in the title is not clear, nor does it really seem to matter, since one of them dies, and he undertakes, while in the throes of remorse, not to make himself known to the other.  Meanwhile the War has happened along and given everyone who needed it an opportunity of redeeming his Past, and, as the hero is getting old and has had a nasty crash in an aeroplane, it seems possible that an era of comparative continence has really set in.  At this juncture we part with him—­I without a pang; my landlady, I well know, with a sigh for his lost irresistibility.

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Barry Dunbar, the heroic padre of Mr. RALPH CONNOR’S story, The Sky Pilot of No Man’s Land (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), hailed from Canada and went to France with the Canadians.  Endowed with superb physical beauty and considerable musical gifts he started, you might think, with fortune in his favour.  But at the outset he was a tactless young man and had a good deal to learn before he was in any way competent to teach.  Mr. RALPH CONNOR has described with skill and great sincerity the horrors of the War in the earlier days; but for me he has spoilt both his story and the effect of it by his extreme sentimentality.  He is persistently concerned to raise a lump in my throat.  I readily believe that he was actuated by the highest motive in trying to show us how responsive the Canadians were when their spiritual needs were attended to by a man of courage and understanding.  But I dislike an excess of emotional spasms, and in these Mr. CONNOR has indulged so freely that his book can only be for other tastes than mine.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Castaway.  “HOO DID YE KEN I WAS HERE?”

Rescuer.  “WIRELESS TELEPHONE—­HEARD A VOICE SAYING, ’I’D GIVE TWENTY POUNDS TO GET OUT OF THIS ROTTEN HOLE.’”

Castaway.  “WEEL, YER TELEPHONE’S DEFECTIVE.  I SAID ’TWENTY SHILLINGS.’”]