This Is the Life

DOWN IN THE VALLEY--H. W. Freeman--Holt ($2.50).

Everard Mulliver has inherited a very respectable grocery business in Bury St. Edmunds (can you ask what country?). But he has been through the War, has no family left, and craves the quiet contemplation of the countryside. He buys a cottage in a nearby village, intending to use it as a week-end retreat; soon he is spending most of his time there. The life suits him, he is accepted by the villagers, becomes a familiar figure at the pub, goes into partnership with Farmer Kindred. His housekeeper falls in love with him, but he is too busy becoming a farmer to notice it, though he gives her much too much good advice about her worthless husband, and once even bites off the lobe of that worthy's ear in her defense. Mulliver is already committed to a farmer's lass; the housekeeper and her brutal husband disappear; the converted grocer marries the girl. It is a pleasantly rustic idyll, with enough quaint dialect to tickle good humor, just enough "real life" to emphasize the idyll.

Author H. W. Freeman, 31, is an Oxford man, but worked on the land for two years after "going down." Says he: "I do not claim any further knowledge of farming than that of a rough general farm hand (i. e., neither cowman nor horseman)." His first book, best-seller Joseph and His Brethren, took five months to write. Down in the Valley was written in Italy last winter.

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