Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

FORTUNE'S FOOL -Sabatini -Houghton Mifflin ($2.00). Colonel Randall Holies, sometime of the Parliamentary Army that crushed Charles I, regicide's son and broken adventurer, found little scope in the Merry England of Charles II for his sword. Hounded by poverty and evil fortune, he stooped at last to lend himself to a discreditable plot of the Duke of Buckingham's--the abduction of the beautiful actress, Sylvia Farquharson, for his Grace's amorous purposes. But the vile act once accomplished, and the well known Sylvia discovered to be his boyhood sweetheart, Holies proved properly heroic--spitted Buckingham in the liver-wing--suffered a terrible beating from that gentleman's lackeys-- nursed Sylvia through the plague, then raging--escaped from a dead-cart--and generally conducted himself in such proper d'Artagnan fashion that it seemed only fair for Mr. Sabatini to reward him with Sylvia's hand and a nice little governorship somewhere in the Indies.

THE CHILD AT HOME--Lady Cynthia Asquith--Scribner ($1.75).

In this quietly delightful volume Lady Cynthia Asquith, wife of a son of the Rt. Hon. H. H. Asquith by his first marriage, discusses The Nursery, At Table, Visitors, Rending Aloud, Pets and the activities, pleasures, perils, fears, delights of childhood in general with certain interspersed reminiscences of her own childhood as charming as they are unsentimental and vivid. She dreaded having to ride the elephant in the Zoo--milk-pudding: she loathed, and still remembers with despair the would-be jocular visitors who greeted her with, "Shall I cut your curls off?" or " Are you jealous of your little brother? "

THE TREASURE OF THE BUCOLEON-- Arthur D. Howden-Smith--Brentano ($2.00). A cipher hidden in Elizabethan verse--secret stairs in an old English manor hall--a fabulous treasure secreted bv Byzantine emperors in the very belly of Constantinople--a gang of international cutthroats who are constantly sandbagging the legitimate treasure-seekers--gypsy brigands versus Turkish assassins -- a spitfire gypsy lass equally ready with kiss or knife-- these are some of the ingredients of as rattlingly energetic a yarn of adventure as any in some time.