SOME SILENT PLACES STILL.

By DanaS. Lamb '21, with a frontispiece by A. Lassell Ripley. Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers. 1969. 100 pp. $15.00.

This handsome new volume of essays of Dana Lamb will hearten every man who holds communion with himself, under an open sky. Not since Richard Hovey, has a son of Dartmouth said more eloquently what it means to walk in silent places, with the hill wind in his veins.

Lamb's prose carves scenes of rare beauty, evoking the joy of remembered things. You sit beside a gravel bed where salmon spawn. You visit dark pools below the falls where silver gladiators pit their Atlantic strength against the stream that gave them life - the bend of rod, the hum of reel, the cold pull of current against waders, with the stones scoured smooth and slippery underfoot. You hear the tinkle of the bell on the setter working upwind through a patch of alders bordered by grey birch; the swinging triggerpull, the drifting feather seen against the morning sun of an October day. The dog will find the small brave migrant with the long bill, at rest on freshly fallen birch leaves, golden yellow, edged with frost. (That setter won't retrieve, declaring that he prefers grouse to woodcock, his foolish master notwithstanding.)

To be admitted to the fellowship of Lamb's world is a rewarding experience, enriched by his friends along the way - the newlyweds who foxed the old maestro on the fished-out trout stream, the small boy with the long-dead eel and the unposted letters in the torn lining of his jacket, the guide who couldn't take it. Not to forget the haunting story of Al McKinley and his aging pointer pooch; they will bring a lump to your throat, while you think of Sid Hayward and Duke - of Corey Ford and Cider, applauding from Valhalla.

Dana Lamb's essays constitute in addition a compelling plea for the preservation of what is left of our heritage, before the twentieth century with its exploding population and its heedless industry pollutes for all time the silent places that remain. Let him who has tossed a beer can on the margin of a stream "where once the only signs of visitors were beaver cutting and the footprints of the moose" take note, and be ashamed, and go and transgress no more. If Lamb's words echo in enough hearts, the environment he loves so well may yet be preserved for the generations that follow us. But time, he warns, is running out.

A fine book. An author to cherish.

Mr. Briggs, a Career Ambassador, retiredto Hanover in 1965 after serving the governmentin the Dominican Republic, Uruguay,Korea, Czechoslovakia, Peru, Brazil, Greece,and Spain.