A BOY IN KENT By Henry Warren Mr. Warren's book
(Bles, 7s. 6d.) is less the narrative of a small boy's life than a series of impressions • of Kentish village life with a small boy in the foreground. We look down the years with Mr. Warren at little scenes in which his budding self once figured, seeing them now through adult eyes. That is, unless we are to believe that the small boy in question was abnormally passive, unenterprising and contemplative—and precociously interested in people rather than in things. But it seems unlikely that he was. ' He had his adventures and enthusiasms and he had the boy's natural precision in face of beasts and birds—a precision that the man has allowed himself to lose, so that while still believing himself interested in these things he can think of a robin's eggs as blue and of a blackbird as breaking the shell of a snail on a stone, and can write sentimentally of the loss of " that easy intentness " as though it were inevitable, even for a countryman. The book has its charm, however, and those who love the country as an ever-changing scene, standing nevertheless outside it and preferring to miss the acts of winter murk,will find much colour and enjoy- ment in it.
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