COUNTRY CONTENTMENTS.*
Mn. SHERI-Nal:CAM'S book reminds us of the classical reply made by Thomas Stoddart to Sheriff Bell, who asked him what he might be doing in life. " Doing ? Man, I'm an angler." Mr. Sheringham is an angler. He has written angling books ; above all, he has the angler's mind. A quiet and contemplative humour informs his doings ; things happen to him that would only happen to a person with a fisherman's temperament. He decides, in the stress of war, to relieve war work by what Gervase Markham, an angler before him, three hundred years ago called " Country Contentments "—a title which he expanded into " A husbandman's recreations." Mr. Sheringham's recre- ations are a husbandman's. He journeys day by day between London and a country farmhouse, and in the country, as Markham's title puts it, there is " wholsemc experience in which any ought to recreate himself after the toyle of more serious businesse." There is a house to be furnished, a garden to be planted, a pony to be looked after, a pond to be puddled, grass to be scythed. These matters require experience, which with Tertia, a helper of direct habits of mind, he gains slowly, and with adventures. The pony, aged ten, is bought and there- upon becomes thirteen ; it ages rapidly under the strain of walking in front of a cart, turns sixteen on a day of wind and rain, develops a cough which makes it twenty-four, and is then banished, there being " no knowing how old that pony might be." The garden, which should produce peas, nourishes hares. Fruits have to be harvested : potatoes, walnuts, plums (plucked from the sky in a net at the end of a salmon-rod)—all within the critical gaze of neighbours, from William Wheelbarrow, whose cold eye tops the gate, to the Marjoram family, who are ready to help at once. "Got plenty of time, then," said William Wheelbarrow, watching the salmon-rod. Mr. Sheringhsm's countrymen arc delightfully typical. But indoors and out, this is a kindly, lazy, occasionally witty picture of hard work. Out of doors we get an air blowing from beech- leaves, crocuses, apples ; indoors, a hint of armchairs, fireirons, the tastes of a book-lover -with views on Turner and Constable. There is a third element with its own humour in a nursery assisted by an Aberdeen terrier, which Mr. George Sheringham depicts with engaging decoration in an end-paper.
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