Canny Auld Cumberland

ROGUE HERRIES--Hugh Walpole Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Says Author Walpole, writing of England's northernmost county: "There is no ground in the world more mysterious, no land at once so bare in its nakedness a rich in its luxury, so warm with sun and so cold in pitiless rain, so gentle and pastoral, so wild and lonely; with sea and lake and river there is always the sound of running water, and its strong people have their feet in the soil and are independent of all men." Cumbrian natives say the same thing in fewer words: "Canny auld Cumberland bangs them a still."

Rogue Herries is a tale of 18th Century Cumberland. Hero Francis Herries rake, skeptic, violent-tempered, takes his family from the comforts of Doncaster to a rude, half-savage life in his ancestral home at Rosthwaite in the Cumberland lake country. His stupid wife irritates him; to irritate her he brings along his current mistress. Soon he is known, feared, disliked by the whole countryside. The troubles of '45 (invasion of England by the Young Pretender) hardly touch him, though he and his son are in Carlisle when the town falls to Prince Charles Edward's Highlanders. His mistress dismissed, his wife dead, his children grown up and married, Herries becomes more and more alone, meets red-headed Mira-bell Starr, outlaw child of the moors, and loses his heart for the first time. The rest of his story tells how he grows old, not gracefully but well.

Author Hugh Seymour Walpole, 46, is son of the late Bishop G. H. S. Walpole of Edinburgh.

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