You remember, no doubt, how Father Payne (a courtesy title), having had a small estate left to him, proceeded to turn it into the home of a secular community for young men desirous of pursuing the literary gift, and how he financed, encouraged and generally supervised them.  Leisure, an exquisite setting, and the society of enthusiastic and personally-selected youth—­one might call the book perhaps a Tutor’s Dream of the Millennium.  Anyhow, Father Payne, as shown in this volume, which is practically a record of his table-talk upon a great variety of themes, is exactly the gentle, shrewd and idealistic philosopher whom (knowing his parentage) one would expect.  Bensonians (of the A.C. pattern) will certainly be glad to have what must surely have been their suspicions confirmed, and to admit Father Payne to the shelves of authenticity.

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Miss DOROTHEA CONYERS has long ere this established herself as a specialist of repute in Irish sporting tales.  You will need but one look at the picture wrapper of The Financing of Fiona (ALLEN) to see that a repetition of the same agreeable mixture awaits you within. Fiona was a charming young woman (Irish, of course) with a rich uncle and a poor, very unattractive cousin, who loved her for her expectations.  As Fiona had no conception about money beyond the spending of it, the uncle made a will, whose object was that she should have plenty.  The suitor, however, knowing of this, and being a naughty, rather improbable person, destroyed part of it, with the result that Fiona was apparently left only the ancestral home and no cash to keep it up.  So she was forced to take in gentleman boarders for the hunting, and (for propriety’s sake) to invent a mythical chaperon, who lived above stairs.  And, after all, she needn’t have done any such thing, because the rich uncle, in leaving her all the contents of the mansion, had foolishly forgotten to mention a secret drawer full of Canadian securities.  As for the villain, I really hardly dare tell you the impossibly silly way in which he allowed himself to be caught out.  But of course all this melodrama is not what matters.  The important thing about Miss CONYERS’ people is that (whatever their private worries) a-hunting they will go; and Fiona, financed by her paying guests, shows in this respect as capital sport as any of her predecessors.  For the rest, I can hardly say with honesty that the story is equal to its author’s best form.

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What I like particularly about Mr. FREDERICK NIVEN is the friendly way in which he contrives to make his readers and himself into a family party.  “We must,” he writes at the beginning of a chapter in Cinderella of Skookum Greek (NASH), “get a move on with the story, in case you become more tired of Archer’s compound fracture than he was himself.”  This is by no means the only occasion on which he