Two years ago, Mr. W. R. Calvert, in The Secret
of the Wild, gave us a particularly charming blend of autobiography and Nature study. The book dealt with the Lake District, and was aptly described by one critic as a prose "Excursion." Mr. Calvert's new volume, Just Across the Road (Skeffington, 12s. 6d.), has not quite the same artistic unity, having been fortuitously journalistic in origin. Some while ago Mr. Calvert contributed to a Northern newspaper an article on the pugnacious stickleback, and the story was so much to the liking of many readers that they asked for more. The series of essays which followed is here reprinted: Each chapter deals, simply, tersely, and picturesquely with some aspect of bird, animal, fish, insect, or plant life ; but the writer is specially concerned with those touches of Wild Nature which; if Only we look for them, we may see " at our own doorsteps, in our gardens, just across the road." Mr. Calvert draws from an apparently inexhaustible fund of personal' observation and knovkledge, and his book, which throughout is animated by well-restrained poetic feeling, is packed with interesting information and quaint lore. It will delight readers who are already Nature lovers, and it should inspire many others to look for the first time " across the road."
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