It is a real pleasure to find that Mr. Cecil Torr has resumed his conversations. His new volume of "small talk" is every whit as entertaining as the first, which we commended three years ago. The old " mid-Victorian bachelor," as he calls himself, who lives near Moreton Hampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor, as his father and his grandfather did before him, is keenly interested in many things and is equally at home with Devon peasants and European scholars. He can elucidate the Dartmoor stone-circles by comparison with those which he has seen in the Lebanon, but he also knows that "casks take up much more space upon a floor when they are lying on their sides than when standing up on end." He is deeply learned in the history of Rhodes and repudiates the claim of the present Order of St. John of Jerusalem to be, in a legal sense, the representative of the old knightly order of the Hospitallers. But he can also tell us why at Wreyland there were many more hedges than in most manors of the same size, because in 1501 four heiresses divided each tenement of the manor into four parts, which were ultimately enclosed.