THE appearance of this slim volume, the first story from the pen of Barrio in almost thirty years, comes somewhat as a surprise. The author of "Peter Pan" and "The Little Minister" seems to be of an age that has passed; and if it were not for occasional pictures in the rotogravure sections of Sunday papers, we would take it for granted that he was long since dead. That he is far from that is proved unanswerably by "Farewell Miss Julie Logan."

It is the tale of a snow-locked glen in the Scottish highlands during a winter of the 1860's. Adam Yestreen, the young minister of the kirk, sets down the eerie happenings of his one and only winter there. A man with simple, homely ways, with speculations as to the strange death of one of his predecessors, with a great kindness for all, and a quaint sort of humor, he falls in love with Miss Julie Logan, that "long stalk of loveliness." Their few meetings have many of the elements of a dream about them, yet she seems very much to be of flesh and blood. But in the end we do not know whether she was a phantom of his sub-conscious imagination, a ghost, or a real person. We are assured that the whole thing is probably but a lapse into madness, but the last bit of evidence about the finding of the basket she had carried makes us wonder. It is this very uncertainty that makes the story uncanny and also successful.

By the author's incomparable ability of handling charming and whimsical detail, the characters, especially Adam, the minister, are made both delightful and real. And quite effective is the atmosphere of complete isolation brought about by the elements.

In "Farewell Miss Julie Logan" Barrie manages to avoid much of the sentimentality so objectionable in some of his early works. He tells the tale with an appropriate simplicity, but on the other hand, he neither adds to its lucidity or excellence by his over-concious use of dialect. Because of the characters and a convincing reality, it is far from being an ordinary ghost story. And it will probably insure the author a popularity beyond the nursery in a modern, perhaps over-sophisticated world.