"Houses," says Mr. Ransome, "are but badly built boats so
firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. . . . The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place." That being so, Mr. Ransome built a boat, or, rather, had a boat built—a centreboard ketch, not quite thirty feet long— and in it, in company with an excellent and indefatigable cook and the Ancient Mariner (an old English seaman who had lived so long in Russia that he had almost forgotten his English), he sailed from Riga, through the Esthoruan islands, to singfors and back, a distance of about 500 miles. His experi- ences and adventures in fair and dirty weather, the places he visited, the primitive life of the Esthonian islanders, some extraordinarily beautiful anecdotes and the charm and humour of Mr. Ransome's writing, form a book of which there is little more to be said than that it is altogether delightful—. a pleasure to read from beginning to end.
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