SPEAKING of Boys and all that goes to the making of the real Boy, it is possibly true that nothing has more greatly conduced to the making of old men young, and satisfying youth with boyhood in the United States, than the development among us of the out-of-door tastes of the present day. It is not many years since the writer of this paragraph was young, and he remembers that in his youth there was little diversion for him out-of-doors, save that of fighting with the big boy of the other faction, or of throwing snowballs at hackmen, both of them exhilarating sports, but having neither of them either an æsthetic or truly scientific side. To-day all is changed. From seven to seventy our boys are engaged, in their leisure hours, in the pursuit of the golf-ball. This pursuit carries them over hill and dale, over bunkers and hazards, and, best of all, over trials and tribulations. It has brought fresh air into the lungs of many a man and woman who really had known fresh air hitherto only by reputation; it has brought into city life an appreciation of the value of a broad horizon, such as few but those who dwell in the country ever see or appreciate; and it has sent many a man to bed knowing why he is tired, so that he sleeps well, and is refreshed, and does not toss about from three until six in the morning wondering what is the matter with him.

Many books have been written upon Golf as a Science. We have been told by pen and by picture how we should stand on the tee, how we should make a brassey stroke, and what is and is not good form, until it is difficult for a beginner to know exactly how he should go about it from a purely scientific point of view. To Mr. W. G. van Tassel Sutphen has fallen the distinction of being the first to make use of the links as the setting for a work of fic tion. The stories comprised in The Golficide, and Other Tales of the Fair Green,' are six in number, and some of them, notably the story which gives its title to the book, and "The Lost Ball," will be remembered by readers of periodical literature as having been much discussed by golfers everywhere at the time of their original appearance.

To a quaint and somewhat whimsical fancy and a very pretty wit, Mr. Sutphen has added certain robust qualities of style which a devotion to the fair green cannot but bring into a man's work; and while it must be confessed that the tales often verge perilously upon the fantastic, they are told with a seeming realism which adds to their charm. Golfiaes everywhere will feel that they are listening to one of their own clan, and to just the extent that they recognize in their author a sympathetic and enthusiastic golf-player they will like the tales he tells so well. Which is the

2 The Golficide, and Other Tales of the Fair Green. By W. G. VAN T. SUTPHEN Illustrated. 16mo. Half Cloth, $1. New York and London: Harper and Brothers.

equivalent of saying that Mr. Sutphen has done something that those who best understand the subject of which he writes will recognize as being exceptionally nice.

A VIVID and thrilling side light is thrown on the Deerfield massacre in the opening story of Miss Mary E. Wilkins's new collection published under the title of Silence, and Other Stories. While one may miss in this particular story the wonderful humor which might almost be said to have been the dominant note in Miss Wilkins's work hitherto, it is not until after the story has been read and is being analyzed that the inward tickling of the soul which goes with almost every page of the author's past work is missed. And in this particular instance the lack of it is not regretted, since it would have been wholly out of place in a narrative descriptive of that trying period of New England history.

In other

The terrors of the incident are as plainly reproduced as though it were being enacted before our eyes, yet Miss Wilkins, like the true artist that she is, and unlike many who in the fiction of to-day deal with the unhappy things of life, does not insist upon the gloom and horror of it all. In the hands of some the picturemight have become a nightmare, disturbing in its exaggeration of suffering; in Miss Wilkins's hands it reads like history presented vividly yet with no undue tearing up of the reader's soul. There is no argumentation to try to prove to the reader that he or she is indifferent to the tragedy of the situation. words, Miss Wilkins in this, as in her other fiction, does not assume that her readers are a torpid band of indifferent persons who need to be egged on to an appreciation of the fact that at certain times certain people have undergone fearful hardships. Nor, on the other hand, does she assume that the readers of the day can only be satisfied by a grotesque and unhealthy sensationalism. If one might hazard an opinion with regard to her position in literature, and how and why she has attained to it, it could be said that it is the simple, natural, convincing realism of her work, the fidelity of her pictures, the sweet underlying humor, the fact that she laughs and cries with her characters, and never at or over them, that have brought her laurels to her.

The volume contains besides "Silence," "The Buckley Lady"; "Evelina's Garden," one of the tenderest of Miss Wilkins's short stories; "A New England Prophet"; "The Little Maid at the Door," and "Lydia Hersey of East Bridgwater." Together they make one of the most attractive collections that Miss Wilkins has yet given us, and in them all are to be found to a marked degree the qualities which have made for their author an audience peculiarly her own.

3 Silence, and Other Stories. By MARY E. WILKINS Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, $1 25 New York and London: Harper and Brothers.

MR. FRANK R. STOCKTON is, as usual, lavish of his wit, humor, heroes, heroines, and quaint personages generally in his new tale of match-making, The Girl at Cobhurst. All of the citizens of the Stockton Republic are live people, but it requires the eye of the Master of Rudder Grange to find them, and when he has found them everybody wonders why it was that they had never been found before. It would not perhaps be too high a title to confer upon Mr. Stockton if one should call him a Literary Columbus. He has discovered more Americans than the gentleman who discovered St. Domingo, and what is more to the point, his Americans have all of them been worth discovering. Whether it be Captain Horn, or Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine on the sea, Pomona or Mr. Podington on the towpath; Sarah Block in the arctic regions, or his latest discovery Miss Panney, one of the most delicious of busybodies, they are people worth meeting, and the oftener they are met the better they are liked.

In "The Girl at Cobburst" Mr. Stockton increases the census of the inhabitants of his mind, materially and worthily. Miss Panney, once she has been encountered, will not be forgotten soon. The new cook at Dr. Tolbridge's, while an eccentric sort of person in that she has a certain amount of pride in her profession, and a conscience withal, and may therefore be said to be unlike most other cooks, is a creature of most pleasing quality, and as for the heroines, Miriam and Dora and Cicely Drane, the reader might almost wish that he too lived only in Mr. Stockton's brain, on the chance of being bound up in a book with three maidens of such unquestioned loveliness, provided, of course, that he, the reader, might appeal sufficiently to the author to be made at least one of his heroes.

Altogether Mr. Stockton has produced a story in which the reader will discover much that has induced a liking for his work in the past. It may be added that the author is up to his old tricks. He calls his book "The Girl at Cobhurst." There were at least three girls at Cobhurst. And to the question of the Lady or the Tiger may well be added the problem which of the attractive three may reasonably be set down as deserving the definite article. Mr. Stockton has confessed his inability to solve the Oriental question. What can he do in the present emergency? Which was the Girl at Cobhurst?

IT is now nearly sixty years since Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh, author of "The Paris

The Girl at Cobhurst. A Novel. By FRANK R. STOCKTON. 12mo, $1 50. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Sketch-book," launched two small volumes upon an unappreciative world under the title of "Comic Tales and Sketches." The contents of the first edition of these volumes, edited by Mr. Titmarsh at Paris, and for which that talented gentleman wrote an editorial preface with the convincing date of April 1, were made up wholly of the "Yellowplush Papers." The second contained four other tales, including the "Life of Major Gahagan," and the "Fatal Boots," the latter of which had already appeared in Cruikshank's Comic Almanack for 1839. It is difficult to believe that for years these volumes failed to meet with any measure of popular favor, although shortly after their initial appearance in "Fraser's Magazine " in 1837 the "Yellowplush Papers" had appealed sufficiently to the taste of an American publisher to warrant him in issuing them in book form at Philadelphia in 1838, without, it is to be presumed, the consent of the author.

It was not until Thackeray had made a pronounced success with "Vanity Fair" in 1848 that a discriminating public paid any attention to "Yellowplush," as many a collector of rare first editions has discovered to his sorrow. The bulk of the edition of 1841 of "Comic Tales and Sketches," lying in the publisher's bins uncalled for, was reissued in 1848 or 1849 with a new title-page, without a date, by which little subterfuge many a bibliophile has been lead into the belief that he has a "first edition," when in reality he has merely a mutilated re-issue of the "absolute first."

Since those days of unappreciation many an edition of "Yellowplush" has been put forth. It would be interesting to know how many if there were at hand any reliable data, but there is not; and how much wiser than the first succeeding decades have been in their literary judgments one can only guess.

The present Biographical Edition of the Yellowplush Papers is fortunate in that it has not only the papers themselves, but an added chapter of introduction by Mrs. Ritchie, in which is given a very intimate view of Thackeray's life at the time when Yellowplush became a fellow to be reckoned with. Indeed, in the eyes of many the raison d'être of the new edition lies wholly in the fact that the daughter of the author modestly essays to tell the world something about her father which the world would most dearly love to hear. It does not often happen that a writer who has a peculiar hold upon the affections of mankind can be presented in his unsuccessful youth by any but himself, and, even as was Thackeray, who desired nothing written about him as a man, the writer who regards his life and his art as things not apart, but separate, is loath to write of that-not because he wishes it hidden, but because from his point of view it lacks importance. That Thackeray should have considered his goings and comings, his habits, his methods, as minor details in his life work one can well understand. That in our day his daughter should regard them as significant is equally to be comprehended, and to write of these things tastefully, tactfully, affectionately, and yet with a modesty of which her father would be prond, is the task which the daughter has set for herself and has accomplished.

One would not willingly lose the picture of

5 Yellowplush Papers. By WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. Biographical Edition. Edited, with an Introduction, by MRS. ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE Illustrated. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $1 50. New York and London: Harper and Brothers.

Thackeray's days as a law student in the Temple which is here so pleasantly painted by Mrs. Ritchie. The friendship existing between himself and his fellows is dilated upon, and Mrs. Ritchie tells us how, "These young knights of the Mahogany Tree used to meet and play and work together, or sit over their brandy-and-water discussing men and books aud morals, speculating, joking, and contradicting each other, liking fun and talk and wit and human nature, and all fanciful and noble things."

It would be difficult to find anywhere in biographical literature a sentence which more fully sums up the qualities which go to the making of a man of letters who has proved himself to be a force to mankind. To like "fun and talk and wit and human nature, and all fanciful and noble things!" This indeed is a platform upon which any one might be glad to stand, and particularly one to whom has been given the task of lightening the burdens of his fellow-men with the creations of his fancy and his observations of life.

In a great measure Mrs. Ritchie's introduction is made up of extracts from Thackeray's own diary, as well as from letters to his mother and later to his wife. There is throughout them all a delicious touch of exuberant humor such as might have been expected from the author at this period of his life, which Mrs. Ritchie charmingly alludes to as "the early burst of fun and spring-time." It is not undue praise to say that Mrs. Ritchie's chapter reads as if it had written itself, and that it will be a welcome addition to the stores of Thackerayana that are treasured by all lovers of his books needs no heralding.