Scuttling Hen

A BROOD OF DUCKLINGS--Frank Swinnerton--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

An old hen will scuttle back and forth on the shore, cackle and screech and flap her wings, but that's the ineffective best she can do for an incongruous brood gliding serenely off to midpond. Mr. Meadows was a very nice old hen, his scuttlings were well-bred, his cacklings mellifluous. In a charming London house he brought up his daughters and entertained their friends. But when his dependable older daughter began to champion one of these, a violent young political laborite; and his darling younger daughter confessed she had allowed another, a scandalous man-about-town, to make love to her, he scuttled and flapped. In spite of his exertions, one daughter (not the one he had suspected) ran off with the laborite, and the other discovered an unexpected admirer. The discovery, and the confusion of identities smacks of threadbare "literary device," but Mr. Swinnerton (author of Nocturne, The Elder Sister) never fails in charm of atmosphere, virtuosity of human converse.