Books: New Books: Aug. 18, 1924

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The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion;

DING DONG BELL—Walter De La Mare—Knopf ($1.75). Two people—a young lady with a silk sunshade, an old gentleman with an umbrella—meet on the platform of a country railroad junction. They have hours to wait. An express goes by; in the hush that follows its passing the old gentleman remarks: "Fifty years ago you could have cradled an infant on that tombstone yonder—Zadakiel Puncheon's— and it would have slept the sun down. Now, poor creature, his ashes are jarred and desecrated a thousand times a day—by mechanisms like that." To scan more closely Puncheon's mound, the two enter the ancient graveyard and stay there reading the epitaphs till twilight falls around them. This is the tenuous framework upon which Walter De La Mare has shaped one more unearthly, sad and lovely book. Turning, as always, from what is to him the Stench, trespass and futility of the present, he breaks bread with phantoms; in these pages the dead stand up and breathe, the living are the ghosts. His words—like the matches the young lady strikes to read epitaphs by in the darkening graveyard—light, for a shining second, Death's crabbed and timeless legendry. Equally exquisite in verse and prose, the beauty of the book makes this brief review an impertinence.

THE GARDEN OF FOLLY—Stephen Leacock—Dodd Mead ($2.00). Stephen Leacock, Harold Lloyd of Letters, prefaces this volume with a quotation from Confucius—or TutankhAmen : "This poor old world works hard and gets no richer; worries much and gets no happier. It casts off old errors to take on new ones; laughs over ancient superstitions and shivers over modern ones. It is at best but a Garden of Follies, whose chattering gardeners move a moment among the flowers, waiting for the sunset."

Some of the beds which Prof. Leacock weeds are those wherein spring up 'the tares of Big Business Bunkum, Correspondence-School Quackery and kindred varieties of contemporary sophistry. He then invades the field of Animal Psychology. The subject of his observations, carried on under enormous difficulties, is that elusive but familiar animareptile, the Hoopoo. The results are: "1) When the Hoopoo is unable to step over anything, she walks around it. 2) The Hoopoo will drink water when she has to, but she will drink champagne whether she has to or not. 3) The religious belief of the Hoopoo is dim."