ISLANDS LURING AND U.NALLURING.*
" EVERYONE knows about Tobago," writes Mr. Stephen McKenna. But everyone does not know about Tobago, and knows very little about Jamaica, hardly as much of Cuba, and practically nothing at all about the Bahamas, one of the islands of which has suggested a title for Mr. McKenna's book.' Nor, to be quite frank, has one learnt much about any of these magic isles by the time the book is at an end. Of information of the informational kind there is scarcely any : once the author coyly introduces a notice of the manufacture of Havana cigars, and again is pessimistic and sententious on the Volstead Prohibition Act. Indeed, anything like gritty fact obviously repels him, and the value of the book lies in its suggestion of atmosphere. 'Without full-length pictures, but in a flitting series of impressionist notes, one is made to feel the sunlight, the colour, the magnificent exuberance of the life of the tropics. It is certain that Mr. McKenna would not tolerate anyone speaking disrespectfully of the Equator in his presence, and he seems to think that happiness in no inconsiderable degree depends upon our proximity to it, and is most especially to be found in the Bahamas, " the first Holiday Islands of the world."
Rut a description of the tropics fills but a fraction of the book, which in the main consists of a charming olla podrida of literary criticism, voces populi, boardship chatter, and musings on subjects that vary from anonymous correspon- dents to the Westminster Pancake greeze and the omniscience of modern novelists (which makes one surprised at meeting
manarla " and " Sidney " Smith). All is touched in with a light and pleasant hand, and it is pleasant to read again the story of the (alleged) schoolboy who construed : " Abiii : he went out to dinner ; excessit : he had too much to drink ; crupit : he was taken ill ; evasit : he said it was the lobster."
Everything that By Intervention of Providence is, The Impossible Island= is not. It is the Baedeker-cum-Sportman's- Guide type of book, and conducts the tourist with gun and rod ratisfactorily over parts of the particularly inviting island of Corsica, where the trout are numerous but small, the inhabi- tants untruthful and brutal to animals, and the brigands in the maquis far less to be feared than those who remain in the towns to run the hotels.
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