Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/225

Farmer. "What do you mean by knocking off work at this time of day?"

Ploughman (who has just seen an aircraft bomb drop in the field where he was working). "I be goin' to 'list for a soldier. If I be goin' to be killed, danged if I'll be killed ploughin'."

There are travel-books and travel-books. What have we not all endured from the linked boredom long drawn out of some of them, their depressing pictures and unleavened letterpress! Fortunately there exists also the kind written by Mr. Norman Douglas, of which the present volume, Old Calabria (Secker), is, I believe, the third. It is from first to last a most joyous production. Calabria is the part of Italy least explored by foreigners; probably this is what tempted Mr. Douglas thither. I am certainly glad, since it gives us all the chance of enjoying the journey in his company. Better could hardly be found. Mr. Douglas has, beyond everything, the gift of eternal youth, which is the ideal equipment of your travelling companion. More than that, one detects in him (for all his sly affectation of regarding himself as a cold-blooded Northerner) a sympathetic kinship with the South, which again and again smooths the path before him and incidentally explains much of the charm of his pages. Mr. Douglas's style is, like his outlook upon life, a thing peculiar to himself and wholly irresistible. He is a philosopher, with a keenly appreciative eye, a fund of real and pertinent knowledge, and, above all, the gift of laughter. It is this chuckling humour, genial, ironic, a trifle Rabelaisian, that one remembers most in the journey; difficulties and even dangers seem to vanish before it. To read this book is in short to read the sort of letters that persons who are abroad ought to write to one at home, but seldom do. One seems to be chatting with Mr. Douglas himself in some warm Southern garden, over an excellent dinner and a bottle (or perhaps two) of native wine. And in such company the wine and the stories would be, one feels, of vintage quality. I should perhaps mention that the cost of the present feast is fifteen shillings. It is worth every penny of it.

I have the feeling that your knowledgeable and expert critic of the higher sort would have no good word to say for Grocer Greatheart (Lane), though he might, in an exhilarated and generous moment, see some good in the analysis of the grocer mind and the picture of the shipwreck in the earlier chapters. The tale of desert island, treasure trove and intermittent revolver practice he would label rubbish, and not very new rubbish at that, and he would remark bitterly that never outside phantasy or farce had the arm of coincidence been stretched to such length as in the chance meeting of the various treasure-hunting parties. But I, being a common reader, entirely satisfied if I am kept breathlessly excited and hopelessly amused, confess to an unequivocal gratitude to Mr. Arthur H. Adams for a first-rate evening's pastime. The particularly fascinating features of his desert island, which by the way pretends to no fairy qualities, included the inexplicable apparition, in the absence of any human habitation, of a lady's stocking-suspender, the mysterious sounds of a brass hand indifferently playing popular airs in the far distance, and the sudden intrusion of a tiger with an excessively ferocious mien but