over what I may call half-fairy stories. Magic I understand and love;
but this now diluted form of it leaves me cold. Take for example the
book that has occasioned this complaint, _The Curious Friends_ (ALLEN
AND UNWIN), an unconventional and perhaps just a little silly tale
about a secret association of children and grownups, pledged to mutual
help and a variety of altruistic aims--a scheme, with all its faults,
at least human and understandable. But Miss C.J. DELAGREVE has chosen
to complicate it by (apparently) a dash of the supernatural, in the
person of a character called _Saint Ken_, about whom we are told
that he lived in a tunnel on the Underground and employed himself in
helping distressed passengers. Well, what I in my brutal way want to
know is whether this is a joke, or what. Because if I have to credit
it, over goes the rest of the plot into frank make-believe. And
fantasy of this kind consorts but ill with a scheme that embraces
such realities as heart-failure and typhus. Not in any case that Miss
DELAGEEVE'S plot could be called exactly convincing. "Preposterous"
would be the apter word for this society of the Blue-Bean Wearers, in
which vague elderly persons wandered about with sadly self-conscious
children and talked like the dialogue in clever books. This at least
was the impression conveyed to me. I may add that I was continually
aware of a certainty that Miss DELAGREVE will do very much better when
she selects a simpler and less affected subject.

* * * * *

In _Douglas Jerrold_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) Mr. WALTER JERROLD has
executed a pious task. He has written the life of his grandfather, and
has done it with great enthusiasm. The work is in two volumes, one
thick and the other thin, and sometimes I cannot help feeling that
one volume, the thin one, would have been enough. DOUGLAS JERROLD'S