of its kind has not come my way for a long time, and incidentally the country itself seems surprisingly desirable.  For one thing it is free from the mosquitoes that spoil so many books of travel, while the people are peaceful, reasonably contented and not liable to jar on the reader’s nerves, in the time-honoured fashion, with spears and poisoned arrows.  Even the yaks, that one had supposed to be fearsome beasts, are mild benevolent pacifists.  The authors do not suggest that it is all Paradise, of course, though for the Moslem there may be something of that sort in it.  “Praise be to Allah!  I have four obedient wives, who spend all their days in trying to please me,” said a Kirghiz farmer to Sir Percy.  But even Paradise may be a matter of taste.

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If War in the Garden of Eden (Murray) cannot be numbered among the books which must be read by a serious war-student it is in its unassuming way very attractive.  Captain Kermit Roosevelt made many friends while serving as a Captain with the Motor Machine-Gun Corps in Mesopotamia, and here he reveals himself as a keen soldier and a pleasant companion.  In style he is perhaps a shade too jerky; his frequent failure to make his connections gives one a sense of being in the hands of a rather rambling guide.  But the important points are that he is an engaging rambler, and that he can describe his experiences both of war and peace with so clear a simplicity that they can be easily visualized.  When the American Army arrived in France Captain Roosevelt naturally wished to join it, and his last chapter is called “With the First Division in France and Germany.”  But for us the main interest of his book lies in the work he did with the British in Mesopotamia, and to thank him for this would seem to be an impertinence.

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Mr. Arnold Bennett’s From the Log of the Velsa (Chatto) deals with some vague period before the War (dates are most carefully concealed), when the versatile author undertook certain cruises up and down Dutch canals, the Baltic, French, Flemish and Danish coasts and East Anglian estuaries with companions about whom he preserves an equally mysterious silence. (Was it secret service, I wonder?) A delightful book, produced with something like pre-war attention to aesthetic appearance—­a pleasant quarto with roomy pages faithfully printed in a fair type.  You ought to enjoy the owner’s evident enjoyment (he was never bored and therefore never boring), his charmingly ingenuous pride of possession, his shrewd, humorous and excessively didactic utterances about painters, pictures, architecture and female beauty, his zeal for water-colour sketching and his apparently profound contempt of other exponents of the craft.  Nothing could be less like (I thank Heaven) the ordinary yachtsman’s recollections of his travels, and I get an impression that Mr. Bennett was not ill-pleased to leave most of the work and the technical knowledge to his skipper.