The novels of Mr. Rhys Davies have revealed a true development. As his last one, "Honey and Bread," was his most delicately and sensitively felt, so its sequel, "A Time to Laugh," is his strongest and most consistently satisfying, his largest not merely in length. We call it a sequel, and it is truly so, though the connexion in terms of characters is a tenuous one, and it may be read independently with complete enjoyment. Only Bronwen, heroine of "Honey and Bread," that almost-idyll of a typically lovely South Wales valley on the eve of its industrial transformation, lives on into this new work, as grandmother of the hero of this story of the same valley sixty years later, at the very end of the nineteenth century.

The earlier book was, up to its last pages, pastoral; this, in contrast, is angrily industrial. The whole life of the...