Mrs. Uttley has drawn once more from her memories of
childhood days in the country and written a delightful con- tinuation to The Country Child. Ambush of Young Days (Faber and Faber, 7$. 6d.)
• will perhaps be too sweet for some tastes, describing as it does childhood glimpsed .through the softening mist of years, and the country as it appeared to the eyes of childhood, which saw only what was fair. She shows us every corner of the old farm, and we can feel the coolness of the dairy, and catch the glint of old copper . and, polished oak, and hear the grand- father clock ticking in the corner. Mrs. Uttley has an astonishing memory for details, and every circumstance is evoked in all the delicate clarity of an old water- colour. "I could see so clearly," she writes, "or else I looked with such in- tentness that I felt one with the.object at which I gazed . . . every daisy had its own crimson honey-spot, or tinge of pink or heavy frill of *hire petals . . . There was a range and tonality in the wailing clangour of a gate the clamour of rooks, the notes of a thrush, which made each gate-shutting, each cawing rook, and each thrush different." Only a child vith such exceptionally acute senses conk! have stored- up 'these vivid
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