barns with their tarred walls and great waving sprawls of roof, the oast-houses with their red cones and white cowls, are all so many fungus growths, pushed up by the soil rather than built by men." It is this country which she has chosen for her own. At first she confined herself to it rigorously. Later she has dared occasional expeditions into the outer world, but she has not yet learned to keep her footing on other ground than Sussex.
Especially is this evident in The Challenge to Sirius. The novel is long and inchoate, bound together only by the fact that it is the biography of Frank Rainger; while he, in turn, is convincing only when he moves against a south-English background. Rainger spends his boyhood and adolescence in the Isle of Oxney, "a little pip of a county wedged between Sussex and Kent." There he returns, a man in his fifties, to marry his first love and settle down. The interval is taken up with a London sojourn—of which Miss Kaye-Smith gives a brilliant and thoroughly second-rate account—a history of the Civil War from Pittsburg Landing to Atlanta, and a final interlude of eleven years in Yucatan.
An English view of the War of the Rebellion is always fascinating to the American reader. Here Miss Kaye-Smith is safe but not inspired. She wisely lays stress more on the general features of the campaigns than on the reactions of the individual soldier; these remain somewhat of a closed book to women. She is less discreet when she gives herself free rein on Southern landscapes. Evidently she has gained her knowledge of them through textbooks of botany. Frank, escaping from the Union forces, makes his way through a jungle of Indian pipe and sumach. He hides from his putsuers behind a pokeberry bush! and at last floats down the Suwanee River, breathing in the heavy scents of orange-flowers, syringa, oleander, and myrtle, and watching the delicate palm-fronds outlined against the stars. . . . It is beautiful, it is exotic, but it reminds one more of Chateaubriand than of Georgia. More real is the portrait of the planter-at-arms, Zollicoffer, and especially that of Lorena Middleton; she is a pressed flower of the Old South.
The scenes in the Isle of Oxney show more accuracy. Tom Coalbrun and his lumpish brother Dave; Maggie, whom Frank Rainger loves mildly and persistently—"She was habit and hunger like his daily bread"—these people are depicted patiently, exactly, and with a skill which Miss Kaye-Smith surpasses only in her descriptions of
