This is Davies' debut collection, published in 1927, the same year as his novel 'The Withered Root'. It includes some of his very earliest serious attempts at fiction, originally featured in a magazine called "The New Coterie". It's a slim volume of scarcely fifty pages, containing six brief tales, all of them set in the South Wales Valleys, and all driven by female protagonists: to the consternation of her family and neighbours, Maria expresses no grief after the demise of her strict father, but only a sense of emancipation; two sisters vie bitterly for the attentions of the lodger in their father's house; a simple-minded young woman's religious fervour is exploited by her preacher... And so on.

These are sketches when compared to Davies' later tales, but they show the beginnings of some lifelong preoccupations, and evince a natural story-telling talent and a recognizable narrative voice that were already in place at the outset of his long career.