various contributors

“ Provided they didn't succeed, I was content to leave them at it and enjoy the fascinating picture of life in a sea-coast village in the good old days when everybody was busy either in preventing or assisting the "free trade;" when a press-gang might come along at any moment and steal a man or two without so much as by your leave, and, generally speaking, things moved. ”

“ If he wants a holiday let him have one by all means, though personally I was not pleased when he left Dartmoor for Italy. But let it be only a holiday, a break in his real business. As for the book, I advise everyone who can appreciate dry humour and quaint philosophy to sit behind The Judge's Chair. "The Two Farmers" is in its way a masterpiece, grim and very real, and there is not the ghost of a sign in the whole collection that Mr. Phillpotts has written of Dartmoor until he is tired of it or it of him. ”

“ Of course this could hardly be called wise of the Colonel; the slightest knowledge of quiet English neighbourhoods in fiction or the drama might have assured him that towards the end of Act I. somebody was simply bound to turn up who knew all. However, he rented one half of a divided old manor house, and, even when informed that the other half was inhabited by a widow of quiet habits, he apparently did not share my own instant certainty that there were coincidences ahead. ”