THE WANDERING YEARS.t IT is not easy to describe this
pleasant, entertaining book After the War the author, for a time homeless, wanders about with her daughter in England and Scotland and Italy. She meets with many agreeable and interesting people, and with many little adventures of various kinds. We have a sense that the latter are " written up " out of nothing at all, but they are well " written up " by a practised hand, and we like to read -them. Katharine Tynan never forgets that she is an Irishwoman, but she loves England and the English. She understandss the antagonism of the two peoples—without ,The Marches of Wessex. By F. J. Harvey Barton. London: Nisbet. (163. line Wandering Years, By.Eatharine Tynan. London: Constable. Ras. Flea
In the least sharing it. There is a passage in a chapter relating some wanderings in the Highlands which is typical of the writer at her best--her prose best we mean. Driven by a friend she and her daughter went to see Chiloden. " There stretched the moor, with its few ragged trees, its bents and coarse grasses, profoundly desolate under the sad sky. On the monument hung a few wreaths not yet withered. We stooped and read the inscription : ' To the memory of the gallant Highland gentlemen who fell for Scotland. and Prince Charlie.' The whole pity and passion of the Lost Cause was present with us. . . . But stay ! At one part of the moor was a fenced- in turnip field, horribly utilitarian, in that consecrated place. We approached to wonder at it. Then we understood its meaning. That, too, had its headstone and its inscription : ' The field of the English. They were buried here.' Only Celtic malice could have inspired the inscription, and the turnip field. I have told many of my English friends about it. They invariably laughed. It is their quality that slowness to anger, that aloof indifference. It is something Celts and Latins have flung themselves against in vain."
Previous page
