There are, as we all know, sketches and cross sections and monographs of almost every conceivable community on the globe. And this type of literature is of interest to practically everyone who is able to get the intellectual jump on the confines of a lazy body and to use his imagination.

Just such a pertinent dissertation, or series of dissertations, is Mr. Lyons' "Moby Lane". The book is a compilation of very short stories by an avowedly humorous, and occasionally incisive, author Not unlike Dorothy Canfield's "Hillsboro People", it is to us more fascinating than that charming collection of stories, partly, no doubt, by reason of its dealing with life in a less familiar stamping ground than New England.

Mr. Lyons lives in Sussex, and he knows the country, the towns and the people inside out and upside down. And when one finishes his stories one feels that one has looked at Sussex towns and people too, from these intimate, if unconventional vantage points. One feels very "knowing", and not a little thrilled at the experience. Mr. Lyons is a "collector of favor able British types", using favorable in the sense of correct and current. The new landed aristocracy, gross as beer barrels and uncouth as hedge hogs, comes in for a bit of trenchant panning. And the Horatio Bottomleys of Sussex are flayed with but little less vigour.

But it is rather as a raconteur with a dash of Hazlitt and Lamb, than as a protagonist of conservatism and taut galluses that Mr. Lyons is interesting. "The Merry Wait" is one of the most finished of the stories, and the songs the Wait sings to spread Christmas cheer deserve framing or something better. This is one,--

"Of young William Corder

I now wish to sing;

Which turrible shame

On his parents did bring

Through killing his sweet-'eart so ter-ew.

To the Red Barn he coaxed 'er:

Then levelled 'is gun,

Maria fell dead,

Saying: "What have you done?

Rash villain, this night you will re-ew!"

Long Life to you, Success to me,

And may our Hearts be full of Glee

This Merry, Merry Ker-ist-mus!"

And the others are equally appalling and illuminating.

To our mind "Viaduct View", with its Miss Twose who "was a very bleached and shapeless little person, who, somehow, reminded one of an inferior dried fig;" "Benny Dodd's Adventure", with its O. Henry climax; "It!", full of pathetic, sodden shoes; and "Spring Scandal", peppered with potentially horrifying gossip such as, "That be a pore creature, the Queen o'Spain, Oi rackon. No flesh. No substance. No curl"--are pretty near perfection in their way.

And to us their way is one of pleasantness and their pathway, thank heaven, is diametrically opposed to the current flourishing, mawkish school of the Be-Beautiful-And-Be-Damned sort of pen-wielders