eem to be some flavours that are hardly
English. The language of the excellent Mary Ellen, for instance, comes to
me with a distinct cisatlantic sound. Nor can I, somehow, visualize a
planked back garden in an English Cathedral Town. I am wondering about
this, and I conclude that perhaps it is due to the fact that Miss de la
Roche lives in Toronto, that delightful city where the virtues of both
England and America are said to be subtly and consummately blended. Her
story, as simple and refreshing as the tune of an old song, and yet so
richly spiced with humour, perhaps presents a blend of qualities and
imaginations that we would only find in Canada; for the Canadians, after
all, are the true Anglo-Americans. Perhaps they do not like to be called
so? But I mean it well: I mean that they combine the good qualities of both
sides._

_And so one wishes good fortune to this book in its task--which every book
must face for itself--of discovering its destined friends. There will be
some readers, I think, who will look through it as through an open window,
into a land of clear gusty winds and March sunshine and volleying church
bells on Sunday mornings, into a land of terrible contradictions, a land
whose emigres look back to it tenderly, yet without too poignant
regret--the Almost Forgotten Land of childhood._

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY.

_Chapter I: Buried Treasure_

I

Probably our father would never have chosen Mrs. Handsomebody to be our
governess and guardian during the almost two years he spent in South
America, had it not seemed the natural thing to hand us over to the
admirable woman who had been his own teacher in early boyhood.

Had he not been bewildered by the sudden death of our young mother, he
might have recalled scenes between himself and Mrs. Handsomebody that would
have made him hesitate to leave three stirring boys under her entire
control. Possibly he forgot that he had had his parents, and a doting aunt
or two, to pad the angularities of Mrs. Handsomebody's rule, and to say
whether or not her limber cane should seek his plumpest and most tender
parts.

Then, too, at that period, Mrs. Handsomebody was still unmarried. As Miss
Wigmore she had not yet captured and quelled the manly spirit of Mr.
Handsomebody. From being a blustering sort of man, he had become, Mary
Ellen said, very mild and fearful.

On his demise Mrs. Handsomebody was left in solitary possession of a tall,
narrow house, in the shad