Current Literature
THE windmill seems to be becoming a fashionable literary subject. We reviewed two books on it in the spring : one the first volume of a general technical survey, the other an account of personal rambles in windmill country. And now here are two more books of this latter type, England of the Windmills, by S. P. B. Mais (Dent, 7s. 6d.), and in Search of English Windmills, by R. Thurston Hopkins and Stanley Freese (Cecil Palmer, 6s.). Mr. Mais, it is true, writes, or so he tells us, with a good moral object : " To send the Englishman out on a new sort of tour," since it is not enough " to tell him that the countryside is beautiful," he must be given a purpose, but this is, in fact, hardly more than an excuse for authorship, and Mr. Mais, a haphazard traveller with a smooth flow of talk about anything that crops up has, after all, something more refreshing to give us than uplift. He writes best of Sussex, " rich in windmills," many of which he describes, then, characteristically, he will turn aside to " walk over the Amberly Wild Brooks to listen to sedge warblers among the reeds." And so on at a leisurely
jog-trot, and those who like windmills will like the book— the same applies to Messrs. Hopkins and Freese's little volume. They give us a chapter on windmill evolution, followed by records of some delightful wanderings chiefly in the Fen country, with line illustrations, which also adorn Mr. Mais's book, though perhaps not quite so charmingly.
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