FULL. MEASURE By De Valda While still in Isis teens,
Mr. De Valda shipped to Australia under sail, and there recouped his fortunes—which had dwindled to threepence net—by eating three week-old penny buns for a prize of a guinea. As assistant master in a Seminary for young ladies, he admits that he put a perhaps too liberal interpretation on the process known as " finishing," but he did better as a planter in the Cannibal Islands, in spite of blackwater fever and a more or less continuous hail of arrows. Thereafter he studied in Paris and at Bonn ; knocked about the Caribbean ; lost a sweetheart in the Jamaican tidal wave • held a Government appointment on the Gold Coast ; became general manager of a rubber and cocoa estate in Panama ; faced a firing party in Ecuador and saw the President of that republic flayed alive ; reported on estates in British Honduras, Spanish Honduras, Oda and Costa Rica • fought as a gunner in Flanders ; was attached to intelligence • rescued a spy from Germany ; sank a submarine off Elyria ; was instrumental in saving Lloyd George from being poisoned with curare ; and learnt as a result of all this, to value manliness in men and woman- liness in women." Mr. De Valda's picaresque autobiography (Full Measure, Arthur Barker, 9s.) is colourful to the point of being sometimes (but not often) incredible. He is never profound but always engaging, and he emerges (if only by virtue of having no Christian name and quoting Ella Wheeler Wilcox) as a very remarkable person.
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