The Four Corners of the World (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is emphatically what I should call a fireside book.  On these chill Autumn evenings, with the rain or the dead leaves or the shrapnel whirling by outside, you could have few more agreeable companions than Mr. A.E.W.  MASON, when he is, as here, in communicative mood.  He has a baker’s dozen of excellent tales to tell, most of them with a fine thrill, out of which he gets the greatest possible effect, largely by the use of a crisp and unemotional style that lets the sensational happenings go their own way to the nerves of the reader.  As an example of how to make the most of a good theme, I commend to you the story pleasantly, if not very originally, named “The House of Terror.”  Before now I have been ensnared to disappointment by precisely this title.  But Mr. MASON’S House holds no deception; it genuinely does terrify; and when at the climax of its history the two persons concerned see the door swing slowly inwards, and “the white fog billowed into the room,” while “Glyn felt the hair stir and move upon his scalp,” I doubt not that you will almost certainly partake of some measure of his emotion.  Naturally, in a mixed bag such as this, one can’t complain if the quality of the contents varies.  Not all the tales reach the level of “The House of Terror”; but in every one there is enough artistry to occupy any spare half-hour you may have for such purposes, without letting you feel afterwards that it was wasted.  And as a hospital present the collection could hardly be beaten.

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Miss MARJORIE BOWEN’S historical romances usually have the merit of swift movement, and that is precisely the quality I miss in The Third Estate (METHUEN).  It does not march—­at least not quick enough.  You will not need to be told that Miss BOWEN has saturated herself conscientiously in her period—­an intensely interesting period too—­and has contrived her atmosphere most competently and plausibly.  But for all that I couldn’t make myself greatly interested in the bold bad Marquis DE SARCEY in those anxious two years before “the Terror,” with his insufferable pride, his incredible elegance, his fantastic ideas of love and his idiotic marriage, the negotiations for which, with the resulting complications, take up so large a space in a lengthy book.  It gives one the impression of being written not “according to plan” but out of a random fancy, with so hurried a pen that not merely have irrelevant incidents, absurdities of diction, and indubitable longueurs escaped excision, but such lapses from the King’s fair English as “save you and I” and “I shoot with my own hand he who refuses.”  Even a popular author—­indeed, especially a popular author—­owes us more consideration than that.

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