Life in Lancashire

HARVEST IN THE NORTH--James Lansdale Hodson--Knopf ($2.50).

The War has ruined its thousands, the Depression its tens of thousands. So runs the modern psalm from which Author Flodson has taken his text. But readers who excusably shy off from one more English story of industrial tragedy in the Midlands need not be so quick to leave Author Hodson's vicinity. This novel of the boom and its collapse in cotton-spinning Lancashire is woven with a deft hand; though the pattern is not new, Author Hodson keeps it from seeming drab.

They were on the road "Back to Normalcy" in the U. S., but in Lancashire in 1920 cotton was king. Samuel, who had been a mule-minder in the Burnham mills, frightened his wife by blowing in their whole savings on cotton-mill stock, made a lucky strike and took up speculation as a living. Everybody else was doing likewise. Conservative Millowner Houghton got involved in many a gilt-edged scheme. Even young Harry, who had literary ambitions, let his better judgment go hang when pretty Trix urged him, and embezzled his library's funds to get some easy money. That time he and everyone else got away with it. But 1921 was a different story: cotton slumped, stocks crashed, mills went bankrupt. Everyone had to haul in his kite. Trix, who had cometted to London as a musicomedy star, went home and contented herself with a soberer Harry. Speculator Samuel took to pushing a cart, selling hot potatoes. Houghtons were sold up, moved away. As Author Hodson brings down a slow curtain on his characters, he leaves them sadder in some ways, wiser in most.

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