ANOTHER PART OF THE WOOD. By Denis Mackail. (Hodder and
Stoughton. 7s. 6d.)—Mr. Mackail takes his title from the stage directions to A Midsummer Night's Dream ; but this modern fairy tale is a tinsel affair and never persuades us, as a good fairy tale should, into the illusion of reality. Greenery Street, for all its sugariness, had a genuinely idyllic touch which the present story seldom achieves. Indeed, in this comedy of two pairs of young lovers, for whom everything comes radiantly right after all manner of difficulties and escapades, the writer seems sometimes to be burlesquing his own excesses. It is fortunate that there is plenty of padding, for the padding is the best part of the book. It is impossible not to smile at Mr. Mackail's facetious zest in throwing fun at any target that offers itself, whether it be a fashionable girls' school, a dilatory postman watched from a window by the anxious awaiter of a letter, or the fussy " local " train that connects Neweliff-on-Sea with Pippingfold and the Clewcr Valley.
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