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Child of the Deep, by Joan Lowell (Heinemann, 8s. 6d.), is a very strange story, both superficially and profoundly. Miss Lowell was brought up from the age of two to seventeen on board a sailing ship commanded by her father, trading for copra, guano, &c., in the South Seas. She was all this time in the most complete isolation from her own sex, and was educated in the midst of experiences and adventures— from skinning a shark to scurvy and a fire at sea—such as come the way of very few men 'or women to-day. Her father roust have been a very extraordinary and a very fine character. His daughter, as shown by her book, has also qualities which would be hard to match. The watersheds of her moral geography show some very unusual contours, and she borrows the trite phrases of our ordinary life to express some very un- usual opinions. Her values are primitive but extremely subtly discerned. There is plenty of incident for the superficial reader ; and for those who read with care there is the pleasure of studying a fine and unusual creature, revealed with an art which must have been born in her, since nothing in her life could have served to give her her literary certainty of touch. From any point of view it is an enjoyable book.
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