27 NOVEMBER 1915, Page 25

Penelope's Postscripts. By Kate Douglas Wiggin. (Hodder and Stoughton. 3s.

6d.)—Penelope has reappeared in a hook which is just a memory of a life other than that which we now live, the life of the years before 1914. The little accounts of her days in Switzerland and in Venice belong by right to those who, from January to July, used to plan and love the fartnight abroad which they remembered from July to January. No one else will care about them ; they are neither fiction nor fact, they are foreign holidays. In and out of them wander summer friends stud hotel acquaint- ances, the Swiss shopkeeper and Miss Van Tyck, who hi Florence "was so busy in 'reading up' Verona and Padua that she had no time for the Uffizi Gallery. In Verona and Padua she was absorbed in Hare's ' Venice,' vaccinating herself, so to speak, with information. If there is anything that Miss Van abhors, it is knowing a thing without know- ing that she knows it," All Penelope's visits are charm- ingly described, with a humour which is seldom forced; but we English folk who have had to spend our summer weeks rather drearily in Wales or Devon cannot but wish that she had stayed longer on the Continent.