16 FEBRUARY 1924, Page 21

BLACKWOOD.

This month's Blackwood contains a long and uncommonly interesting narrative of one of those adventurous expeditions which British officers made into Central Asia during the last year of the War, and after the Armistice. "The Schooner and the Soviet" reads like a romance, but is, we believe, substantially true. General Dyer's published narrative of his own experiences on the borders of Eastern Persia and Baluchistan was quite as thrilling. The object of the schooner's mission was to convey arms to Turkoman chiefs who were fighting the Bolsheviks. Miss Moira O'Neill does well to describe, with plentiful quotations, "The Letters of Ernest and Henriette Renan, 1846-50." Reran had then renounced his clerical career, and was a hard working student' in Paris, and he gave his sister the benefit of his thoughts and his impressions, both of the learned world and of politics, and of his first visit to Rome and Monte Cassino. A popular service in the Coliseum *minded or convinced him that " humanity is naturally religious." There are as usual stories and sketches of various countries and a capital tale of a Syrian dog.