The Wind Among the Barley. By M. P. Willcocks. (Mills
and Boon. 6s.)--It is difficult to award the palm to any one of the delightful sketches which Miss Willcocks has put together under the pleasant title of The Wind Among the Barley. The scene of them is laid in a village on the coast somewhere on the borders of Devonshire and Cornwall, and to the pastoral charm of the stories is added that of the deep sea. Humour also is present in many of them, notably in "The Unknown Quantity," though here it is of a grim description. No one will read without a smile of the doctor who stifles the voice of professional duty and gives a lethal dose of morphia to a detestable man deeply injured in a boiler explosion, only to find the man's wife at the surgery door the next morning asking for more of the medicine which made Jim sleep so " beauti- ful" I The same quality illuminates the story of the fugitive con- vict who was lost because the woman who helped him could not find her husband's worst trousers and was too mean to give him the second best pair, so that when he was forced into a shop to buy bread he was discovered by his prison pair. It would be easy to go on multiplying instances of the charms of this book, charms which are more delicate than the above descriptions would perhaps lead one to believe, but we have said enough to show the rare quality of Miss Willcocks's work. The sage dictum of Mrs. Pethybridge, one of the village mothers, must, however, be quoted :—" E-new" (ennui), said I to myself, "and e-new strikes at the liver When yOu're over forty." It is a pleasure to read the
whole volume, and Mies Willcocks is much to be congratulated ou having written it.
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