Mr. Rhys Davies is so completely a master of the short story that one has little to say of him, except to express wonder at his sustained vis comica, his superb gift of complete characterisation in the smallest conceivable space, and his consistently felicitous inventiveness. When he abandons comedy, he is often equally impressive: in [The Trip to London] there is a story called The Public-House, about a child's first contact with adult lustfulness, which is well enough done to bear comparison with Joyce's terrifying story An Encounter, which has a similar theme. I think it is merely the juxtaposition, within a single volume, of disparate scenes—Wales and England—that gives one an occasional doubt about the success of Mr. Davies's non-Welsh stories. The long Orestes, in the present collection, has remarkable power, though its parallels with the fall of the house of Atreus seem, for all...