16 APRIL 1937, Page 40

Miss Leigh has written an account (Bell, 8s. 6d.) of

a year's work on a farm on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. She had only one assistant, and they had contracts with the Milk Marketing Board, which she likes, and the Pig Marketing Board, which she does not. They kept sheep, also, and grew some crops. She finds a profound satisfaction in the memory of even the hardest work, in enriching poor land and improving stock, in " simplicity, durability, the fitness of each tool for its work." She has a Wordsworthian passion for solitude and lonely places, and her descriptions of the well, of riding through a patch of mist into the starlight, of the storm, have a minuteness of detail, a co-ordination of sight, sound, and touch, a sense of being in harmony with nature which remind one of him. Line, form, mass, movement catch her eye rather than colour. Her style is straightforward, firm, capable of good images, often fine, sometimes too literary. She writes with a pleasant, dry humour, and discusses agricultural questions shrewdly. There are some good scraper- board illustrations by W. E. Spradbury.