20 APRIL 1929, Page 29

- A SAGA OF THE SEA. By F. Britten Austin.

(Benn. 7s. 6d.)-In a series of ten short stories Mr. Austin describes characteristic episodes in the world's naval history. He bins with Ulysses and the Phoenician merchantmen, and ends with Nelson at Trafalgar, and with the fight between the Merrimae ' and the Monitor ' that saved the American Union and incidentally tolled the knell of the old-time wooden warship. The book is- hardly fiction in the conventional sense. But Mr. Austin has the imagination of a true artist, and presents his facts not only with vigour, but with plenty of well-absorbed historical and local colour.