he would ride this or that line of the country, where he would take the fences, how he would rise the hill and come down the grass beyond. But there may be, too, a lazier, quieter way: and perhaps it is the best of all. It is to rest in the easy corner, to feel the sense of steady, powerful movement taking the train into new country, and to watch the gentle stages, the content and the tranquil work and life in the sunlight of changing, passing fields and woods and roads.

A train journey shows flowers as the walker on country roads cannot see them; and there is a new introduction. too, for most people to the life of many birds and beasts too shy of approaching man, but fearless of the rush and roar of the railway. Rabbits on the slope of a railway cutting will let an express train thunder past their tails a yard or two away without a twitch of the ear; a man a hundred yards down the line would have sent the white scutts flickering to cover. Partridges care nothing for the shaking and shrieking of a heavy train putting on brakes on an embankment; and the writer once saw a Soemmering's pheasant, which you would suppose could have had little time to accustom itself to English railroads, pecking unconcernedly in a primrose copse close under the rails of a branch line in Surrey. Nothing more brilliant than the glowing scarlet of the bird's neck and shoulder against the pale flowers could be seen in an English wood. There are even birds which seem to prefer railway banks to other places. Swallows and martins, of course, love to flock about telegraphwires in the autumn, but they are The Spectator.

scared to sudden chatterings and flight ings by an oncoming train. But there is a bird-the red-backed shrikewhich regards railway-lines and telegraph wires as erected for his peculiar benefit. He nests in scrubby thorn under the telegraph-poles, and on the wires he sits and surveys a weaker, gentler world of nestlings and edible beetles. Here and there the railway bank has become more than a nestingplace for shy birds; it has grown into a true wild garden. Wallflowers seed themselves in the interstices of cuttings through rock; the yellow toadflax shines on the rim of chalk walls, and the tiny pink convolvulus pushes its tendrils in the dry and dusty heat of crumbled chalk and gravel; but the freshest flower of all the railway banks is the primrose. Where the primrose seeds itself generously and happily, the scenery even of a long run through a high cutting can have the graces of a garden. Perhaps it is the sheer length of the run, the miles of country covered as they would not elsewhere be covered, that leads often enough to a railway journey finding the first rea! clumps of primroses of April, the first dog-violets, the earliest burst of white may. It must be the extent of fields, one after another, seen from the railway that shows much more often than not the first shrinking, suckling lambs of January; and for many who have travelled after weeks of London into the English West Country at Easter there must always be a memory that belongs to the railroad first; broad green acres in evening sunlight, and the earliest short cowslips dotting yellow about the cool, scented fields.

Mr. Arthur Stringer's "The GunRunner" contrasts agreeably with his two novels having a criminal hero and heroine at play with science and law, for this hero is a "wireless" operator who permits himself no worse crime than arranging destiny for those whose messages he should have treated impersonally and impartially. In his case, there was really no choice beyond that between aiding political corruption, and acting with the righteous, strict impartiality was not permitted to the author, and his choice of the lesser evil is commendable, especially as it favors the heroine, a stout little partisan of a certain non-existent South American republic, and a hearty enemy of the "gun runner," who is the wellknown mercenary Irishman, the familiar friend of all readers of Mr. Harding Davis, and an actual personage. His deeds are the interesting part of the story. The uninteresting passages are those which bristle with the technicalities of "wireless," for Mr. Stringer has not the skill to make them live in the reader's eye; he is dominated by them, but when he lets them go and the ordinary Spanish American revolutionary ways come into effect, the story becomes enjoyable; amid a general fusillade the lovers come into their happiness and the gun runner departs from this world. In one of the closing chapters a wonderful motor race is described with much skill and spirit. B. W. Dodge & Co.

Frank Danby's "Sebastian" appears in England under a title plainly indicating its author's hostility to the English public school which she seems to regard as a blight upon the fair promise of English youth, but her Sebastian is one who would hardly succeed in

the England of to-day, not even if he were educated solely by his all accomplished mother. He belongs to the Georgian period, being of the class of Vivian Grey and Cadurcis, the class which patronizes its teachers, sets itself tasks of fantastic difficulty, and is so unendurably brilliant that tutors blink in despair. Consciously, he dates back only to "Stalky & Co.," which work he quotes to one of his masters and regretfully admits that it "made him mad." He does not win a prize for poetry and he and his mother agree that the award which gives it to another is dictated by the policy of favoring boys who play games. He desires to leave school and to make his own life and ultimately his desire is gratified. Obviously, such a youth should be a failure, but in spite of an injudicious marriage he is successful, not because of the intellect inherited from his novel-writing mother, but because of the dogged industry handed down to him by his father. The mother, Vanessa, whose twin sister Shella is a naughty person conceived in Frank Danby's ordinary manner, is a writing machine, a thinker of plots, an originator of titles with no heart and no time for other things not even for the proper estimation of the husband whose adoration of her takes the form of silent indulgence and patient endurance of her indifference. She never sees the real world but lives in the one from which she is making her books, and she is always a mischievous force, not by intention but from ignorance. Enlightenment comes to her when a man compels her to love him, but here the book closes. Sebastian has developed from a prig into a man by force of work and love. She who would have made him her pup

pet modelled most exquisitely but yet a puppet is left as she begins to follow in his footsteps. As a study of the relations between a self-conscious mother and a self-conscious son the story is good, but why poor Eton is belabored is a mystery to the end. The characters who play chorus are slight but good and the book has none of the lapses of taste found in all its author's previous novels. The Macmillan Company.

Mr. Louis James Block's "The World's Triumph" adds another to the little group of recent American poetical dramas excellent in themselves and of happy augury for the future, inasmuch as their authors imitate neither Ibsen nor Wilde but seek the old ideals of beauty, although they stand abreast with the latest modern thought. "The World's Triumph" although superficially a drama of the middle ages, is really concerned with the great question of the day, the method by which the abuses nourished under the old order may without violence be displaced by fairer plants for the healing of the nations. The scene is Modena, at a time when the plague holds the city in its grasp, the helpless, frightened people angered by their affliction; the Duke shorn of his natural frivolity, and grave with the fresh consciousness of responsibility. Fra Giacomo, Franciscan and reformer, denounces and prophesies, and Alfarabi, Saracenic astrologer, reads the stars and gives counsel, and neither prince nor people is much benefitted, but at last Fiordimanda comes, the peasant maid whose wisdom is love, and people and prince take heart and set forth on a new way, the plague departing, the black apparition of Death seen in the sky revealing itself as "a lesser light within God's light, a love obedient to His love." Apparently the drama is intended for the closet but its mysticism

Innocence is not an impressive quality, and even with the advantage of direct narration the task of presenting it in personification is so difficult that the author who essays it risks the appearance of absurdity, and the reproof of burlesque, but temerarious indeed is the novelist who attempts to write in the character of innocence telling the story of its life. This has been Miss Lucia Chamberlain's endeavor in her "The Other Side of the Door," and her success has been very remarkable. The heroine, a motherless, convent-taught girl, recently promoted to the head of her father's table, lives in the San Francisco of 1866, the city in which evil manifested itself with frankness so complete that it excited no curiosity, and chance determined whether a well

bred girl should be too wise in the evil ways of the world, or absolutely ignorant of them. To Miss Chamberlain's heroine fell the latter fate, but a single moment placed the power of life and death in her hands, with liberty to choose between them, and her choice and the manner of it compose the story, which the author makes as bewildering to the reader as it seems to the ignorant little maid who tells it. This is because he is cynically confident so charming a heroine was not created for sudden death or even for slow decline. The evil genius of the tale is perhaps a little dramatic, but life was not exactly tame in the San Francisco of forty years ago and melodramatic figures and incidents were no great surprise to those who knew the city well. The fashion of the dress ascribed to the various personages is at least ten years too early and any physician who, in the San Francisco of 1866, had discoursed of a "sub-conscious effort of the constitution to combat" anything whatsoever would have been suspected of lunacy, because a generation in advance of his time, but these are trifles of small consequence compared with the originality of the book and the skill exhibited in its construction. Merrill Company.

Bobbs

The novel of slavery having been rediscovered as a possible form of contemporary fiction, such books as Mr. Herman Whitaker's "The Planter" become possible, and they who would renew some of the emotions felt half a century ago when reading "The White Slave," "Caste," and "Ida May" may do so through their agency with a difference. For instance, the bloodhounds of to-day do not turn foxhounds and worry the man whom they have overtaken, and the creature pursued is of almost any hue rather than black, and. whether male or female, has certain savage characteristics instead of rather

surpassing the white man in eloquence, refinement and Christian spirit. More

over, in the case of no less than three novels issued within six weeks, the hero hesitates to marry a woman not of his own color, manifesting caution which the authors of the earlier novels of slavery would have regarded as highly pusillanimous. David Mann, Mr. Whitaker's hero, is one of these youths. He goes to Tehuantepec as manager of a rubber plantation conducted for no other purpose than to afford a visible means of support for a corporation organized under the laws by which Maine favors company promoters disposed to be dishonest with those whom they employ, and with those whose money enriches them, He discovers the laws by which certain Mexican States make their convicts profitable, and at the same time expedite their progress to another and a better world, and, being a good young man, he is highly scandalized to discover the theories of morality practised by the planters, and encouraged by the natives. Moreover, he plays Joseph to three Zuleikas of blood more or less mixed, and outwits both the company promoters, and an Austrian Jew agreeably combining the qualities of Legree and Don Juan with the ar tistic tastes of the Hebrew, and as good a villain as could be desired. The promised thrills come from the attempts of Yaqui Indians to escape from bondage and from stories of their wrongs at the hands of the Mexicans. These tales are historically accurate and make the American reader wonder at the moderation of his own people, for the stories of wanton bloodshed are quite equal to Mr. Rider Haggard's accounts of African massacres. Taken with the occasional gibes at the Mexi can President they tend to injure the well-diffused theory that contentment flourishes South of the Rio Grande, Harper & Brothers.