Mr. Mayne's settings are most often Yorkshire villages, his characters ordinary middle-class people—except that they are never really ordinary. To browse through a number of his books at the same time is to realize how many people he has brought to life in print and how complete an individual each one is. The children disagree, sometimes quarrel and weep, but the atmosphere that one remembers in his many stories is good humor. The relationships are affectionate and amusing, the dialogue full of quips and jokes and amiable insults. Sand … is an especially good example of the individuality of characters, The Battlefield … of the quick wit and the lively give and take in the conversations. The Yorkshire dialect sprinkled through the stories is less confusing to American children, I believe, than Mr. Mayne's tendency to make three words do the work of twenty. He has been called a...