Story of a Snail

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 172, 17 April 1937, Page 9 (Supplement)

Story of a Snail

“The Interminable Trudge of Samuel the Snail,” by Hugh E. Wright (London: Methuen and Co,, Ltd.). Here we meet several familiar inhabitants of the garden, little creatures that you will find any day if you search under logs and leaves in the odd corners; but here they are with a real, live story woven round them. Samuel is the chief character, and it is round his doings that the story chiefly hinges. Ho sets out in quest of adventure, and decides first of all to turn his shell into two self-contained flats which he intends to let in order to finance him

on his travels. An earwig takes the lower one and a centipede, who is a retired colonel and a bit “gruff and grumpy” (although Samuel is sure that his heart is in the right place), takes the top flat. Then they set off for Scotland. But, after all sorts of adventures —or misadventures—they find that they have landed up in the same place, and Samuel decides to close up the flats. After that he takes up firefighting as a profession, but an unlucky accident ends his career there. So he decides to go to London to see the jubilee, gets to Covent Garden Market in the heart of a lettuce and actually has quite a number of hair-raising escapes and adventures. The seaside calls him next, but Samuel doesn’t like the sea very much—it doesn’t agree with him! So he keeps to dry land in future, and in the end we find-a happy little snail settling down to quiet life again after being, as Samuel himself puts it “on the 8.8. C. and the rolling sea”; for all his adventures were told over the wireless. There is a large number of quaint illustrations.