New-York tribune., 1921-05-01

been identified, in their writings, with
portions of their native countries. 1t
is natural that the poet and novelist
watch and convey to type the scenery
and the people of their close environ
ment. Much of Sussex, it's folk and it's
legends has seeped through the magi-
nation of Kipling and into his books.
r. Thurston Hopkins, aware of this
kinship between the man and his land,
tramped over the Sussex fields and
roads in the happy purpose of pill
grim identifying Kipling with certain
hooks and features of his beloved
county. In Kipling's Sussex, book
singularly rich in the color and local
tradition of southern England, he
creates. an atm osphere of literary back
ground for the man who wrote Puck
of Pook's Hill and the lines:
Memory, Use and Love make live
Us and our fields alike"
The book is more than an effort to
frame Kipling in the setting of Sussex
1t is a travellers companion, readable,
entertaining, lavish in its references to
history and letters, peculiarly fortunate
in the way in which it introduces
Hilaire Belloc and other lovers of the
Channel Downs.
Two books of a number on the West
Indies are especially to be praised,
Harry A. Franck's Roaming Through
the West Indies. and Sir Frederick
Treves's The Cradle of the Deep. The
first is moved into being by the in
quisitive spirit of a wandering, wide
eyed American and the second, more
leisurely written and rich in it's per-
spectives of history and legend, is
typically the work of scholarly Eng
lishman. Trcves has dash Of the Kip
ling national flavor in his prose.
Harry A. Franck has won little
army of friends and genuine admirers
through his previous books. AS the
vagabond adventurer-the term is COM
plimentary--hc has the George Borrow
faculty of ingratiating himself into
the hearts of people racially hostile,
and of getting into his prose a very
sees before him in city and town, sea
and forest. In his West Indian pill
grimage, recorded in Roaming Through
the West Indies, he trailed the coast
C,,k~ ~ D. %olr
and enlarging upon his reactions to
country and peoples in the whole
circle.
Sir Frederick Treves in The Cradle
of the Deep always has the gorgeous
canvas of the heroic past hung like
a seascape and skyscape for all his
painting of and musings on the birth
and slow growth of Caribbean civili-
cation. The two books taken together
make complete and wonderfully fas-
cinating review and study of the
islands Immediately to our south. But
the Englishman confined his writing,
historical and observative, to the
islands that, beginning with Barbados,
sweep around to Porto Rico and Santo
Domingo, avoiding Cuba. Above the
beauty of the soils he visited. touched
on in his chapters, one fesls the pres
ence of old affairs and ghostly heroes
The subtitle to Lieutenan. Colonel
T. r. St. Johnston's The Islanders of
the Pacific is The Children Of the Sun.
Unlike most books of travel in the
South Seas, cursory in nature, this
volume blends nature and man in a
study of physical conigurations Of
hills and shores and an interesting
study of the lore and the religious
customs of the natives of Fiji. There
is careful balance maintained all
through this books thoroughly schol-