It is often not the onlooker so much as the
beginner who sees most of the game, and it is well if we have undergone a new experi- ence the nature of which we desire to impart to the world at large by means of the written word, to write that word at once. Miss Vera Dart's admirable and straightforward account of her experience as a Land Girl, Down on the Farm (Allen and Unwin, 2s. 6d. net), bears the stamp of having been written before the first impressions had worn off ; before, as in our normal life, the subjective passed into the objective. Anything but pastoral, not slurring over the miseries of handling mangels in the winter or driving sheep in the summer, her book nevertheless leaves the reader with the impression that though the work was hard and strange Miss Dart found it in a way congenial. Though she was conscious of the indignity of handling a stiff-necked generation of calves (how terribly strong quite young calves are), she was equally conscious of the slow rhythmical charm of the plough, and of the wheeling plovers under a grey sky. This book should be read by any girl who is still making up her mind what she would like to do as a profession, and it will be read with great pleasure by those who have already done war or peace work on the land.
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