The Smugglers. By S. R. Crockett. (Hodder and Stoughton. 6s.)—Mr.
Crockett's "Smugglers," or "Last Raiders of Solway," as they more appropriately appear in the sub-title, are a very superior race, very much greater than anything that we can pro- duce in South Britain. Their chief, Lamm Pslafox, is a very great personage indeed, who makes nothing of buying the estate of an old Scottish family as a present to his granddaughter, the heroine of the story. But, by way of contrast, we first meet with this granddaughter, Zipporah, as "a bare-legged, rag-and- tag, red-frocked, black-haired gipsy lass," and, later on, we find that the great man's wife has kept house for no one knows how long for the Minister of Orraland. Baldly put in this way these things sound outrageous, we might say absurd; but Mr. Crockett does not give us time to form such or, indeed, any judgments. He carries us with him, and we do not stop to think. It is enough to know that the journey is one of which we are not in the least weary. As for Zipporah we can believe anything of her. She begins her "Odyssey," as Mr. Crockett appropriately calls her adventures, by outwitting the gipsy horse-thieves with whom she is travelling and she ends it—not counting the inevitable wedding —by holding Fort Eza, somewhere on the North African coast, against the mutineers of the `Golden Flagon' and the troops of some disreputable sultan down Morocco way. This is a brilliant bit of work.
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