An entertaining and reliable book about the country through which
one is passing adds considerably to the pleasures of any holiday afoot, and in the West Highlands of Scotland especially, if one is alone, and unfamiliar with the lie of the land, such a book is an almost essential companion volume to a good ordnance map. Mr. T. Ratcliffe Barnett, in his The Land of Lochicl and the Magic West (Robert Grant, 7s. 6d.), writes with a cheerful intimacy with that enchanted country which those who are fortunate enough to retain the use of their feet—no, we have no fellow-feeling for motorists in this wild fairyland—will find delightfully suggestive as well as unusually readable. The two chapters on The Sea Gates of Wester Ross " are richly descriptive and have the authentic lure of the country they portray. How well we remember the beauty of those almost tropical summers towards the western seaboard of Ross, where " the moist warm climate seems to intensify the very colours of the flowers," till a lochside garden becomes a blaze of brilliance, " with myrtles and roses everywhere " between the mountains and the sea. The score of papers in this book are among the best that have recently appeared in the Scotsman's Saturday articles—an established feature of daily journalism very far removed from the alarms and excursions of the " stunt " Press.
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