21 JULY 1923, Page 20

Box o' Lights. By Henry Baerlein. (Leonard Parsons. '7s. 6d.)

Reading Mr. Baerlein's stories is like dreaming. One is very much at home in a strange place ; whether we consort with the saints and sinners of the Middle Ages or meet Gambetta's father in a Paris grocer's shop we are never surprised. We arc under the author's spell. He enchants and he distresses us as in a dream ; at the end of each chapter we awake and are glad or sorry to do so just as we are in real life. Neither the distress nor the delight-lasts, but it is an amazing talent which enables him thus to enthral us.