PURELY FOR PLEASURE By Elinor Mordaunt
Mrs. Mordaunt calls Purely for Pleasure (Seeker, 8s. (Id.) "the first book I have ever written-entirely for my- own delec- tation." With so acute an observer, and one whose sense of pleasure is so 'sensitively yet so Widely tuned, the method ha, much to recommend it. Additional advantages for the reader are that she is neither the tourist (a definition upon which she very amusingly speculates), who feels bound_to fit.the maximunt amount of experience into his time, nor the explorer, who has an ulterior motive behind his travel. She is the traveller per se, the drifter almost, who can pass leisurely from one place to another, admire, dislike, or laugh as the scene demands. Gentlemen," she reads in a Texas town, "are requested not to wipe their boots on the face towels." In West Florida she attends service in a negro church, an experience as stimulating to her vivid, active imagination as any in the book. She wit- nesses a prima donna singing to monkeys: she watches snakes being persuaded to part with their poison on a snake farm : she travels on a ship loaded with animals : she lunches with giraffes. She does not avoid danger, -though there is no suspi- cion in her pages of courting it. The book is an extraordin: ry record of things seen in diverse places, and every page show, that Mrs. Mordaunt is one of those who are born to see what most people miss, whether at home or abroad., "The morning breaks with a sniall tight sum red as a child's ball, slipping up over the wall of Sudd, precisely matched by another ball in the grey Nile beneath it: Altogether, Purely .)or Pleasure is as good a travel book as we have ever encountered.
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