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sounded heartily again. "There he is, a little stiff and pretty well smouched up with cinders, but safe and sound !"

The man whom Thorne and the minister were supporting, and whom they gently pu-hed into the vacant chair (promptly supplied by the stout lady), was indeed so covered with cinders and sleet that had frozen on him that he discovered hardly a feature; he could scarcely move his stiff legs, and his head sagged on his thin shoulder. Yet, at the voice, he straightened himself, feebly shook off his supporters, muttering, "I kin walk all right !” and weakly tried to smile.

His wife looked up at him. 'Oh my! Pete!" said she.

"I'm jest too dirty to set down in these nice chairs," he apologized; "don't you touch me, Nellie !"

But his wife laid his head recklessly on her shoulder, and motioned for the coffee to be handed to her.

"All you need is a little coffee," said she, "and that lady's been warming it ready for you--oh, Pete, folks have been so kind to me!"

"And me, too," cried Pete. "Nellie, it was the old man himself helped me off and paid my fare; and he's going to give me a letter to the Kansas City pecple. You put it down so's we kin pay him back. Nellie, there's lots of kind p ople in the world, after all."

Fo'ks are kind enough if they only know," Nell e answered.

Thorne caught the words as he passed, and repeated them to his friend.

"Well, I think you have done your duty by your partner this time," said the minister.

"Poor partner!" said Thorne, musingly. "Labor is getting pretty much all we make in our business, yet look at him; and if I were getting a little more he'd be all right. Poor partner!"

Books and Authors

Books of the Week

[The books mentioned under this head and under that of Books Received include all received by The Outlook during the week ending April 16. This weekly report of current literature will be supplemented by fuller reviews of the more important works.]

NOVELS AND TALES

The country hotel has perhaps never before been the starting-point of a novel containing masterly rieces of character-drawing. It required the genius of Mr. W. D. Iowells to put the summer hotel into a novel in such a way as to suggest almost every passion that moves men and women, and to typify in the hotel's evolution from a farm-house to a fashionable mountain resort the evolution of character of those who controlled its destiny. The wife and mother toiling hopelessly on, year after year, on a rocky farm, unconscious of the ambition and strength within ber, until the arrival of an artist looking for subjects reveals to her the salvation that is to be found in the "summer boarder," is one of the most interesting characters. That is the beginning, but the end is, to quote a neighbor, a "runnaysonce "hotel, "and you ride up to the office through a double row of columrs under a kind of portico." This is accomplished through the aid of a fire-a fair analogy of the evolution of the character of the owner of the "runnaysonce" hotel. There are many types of character in The Landlord of the Lion's Head Inn: the girl whose character makes one think of a pure white

light; the crafty woodsman, her father, who has in him the elements of the poet-philosopher, united with the Yankee thrift which makes him see all the opportunities for gain; the worn-out family of wealth, whose last scions have nothing left but their social positions and nerves, whose lives are brought into close touch with a boy who is as untrammeled by moral restraint as the wild things in his native woods; and the artist whose chance appearance on a summer evening at a farm-house about to be deserted by its owners puts an idea into a woman's head--who be comes also, in spite of his effort to escape, the friend who must appear at every crisis in the life of the family whose flight to the West he unconsciously stops. There are also two or three Boston families who have heard of the world of barbarians who live outside of their circle and commit crin:es against "good form." These are necessary to give means to introduce the boy from the woods to the world of social standards. Strongest of all is the New England woman fighting poverty, disease, and death, but bringing out of it all ambition, spotless integrity, and desire to give her son the opportunities that a touch with the world shows her men must have to succeed, who dies defeated of her main purpose because the inheritance she transmitted from her father to her son makes it impossible for him to be what she would have him; while the moral strength she gives him saves him from being what his grandfather was. "The Landlord of the Lion's may not cause a sensation in the

Ilead Inn

literary world, but it is as good a piece of work as Mr. Howells has ever done. The character-drawing of the women is finer, surer, and more comprehensive than is usual with Mr Howells's women. (Harper & Brothers, New York)

Miss Beatrice Harraden's new novel, Hilda Strafford, is a gentle and quiet story of life on a fruit-ranch in Southern California. All the characters are of English birth, and the longing for "home" of the young men, counteracted by ambition, duty, and love of outdoor life, is contrasted with the passionate discon ent of a young Eng. lish wife, who in the end breaks her husband's heart and helps end his life by her lack of appreciation of his efforts to make her happy in sur roundings to her unint-resting and repellent. There is really no other plot, and in every way the story is a slight one, but written wih refinement and care. (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.)From the same publishers comes Mr. Paul Leices ter Ford's The Great K. & A. Train Robbery, an exceedingly lively and amusing tale of Western railroad adventure -somewhat improbable in a few details, but spiri ed and original.

Mr. Robert Hichens's Flames is the most ambitious work of fiction yet written by the a thor of "The Green Carnation." Occultism, "suggestion," soul-transference (or what in old times would have been called simply magic) are used to introduce a study of vice in London. The atmosphere of the book is "degenerate" and unpleasing, though it does not seem to have been written with a positively bad purpose. That the author has ability is certain. If he would write a plain, straightforward story of life and character, we believe that he could make an honored place for himself among English novelists. But he is taken up with "tendency" theories and morbid studies of the morally diseased side of modern life. He often says keen and even brilliant things; his men and women (apart from their dealing with the supernatural) talk and act like real human beings: he knows London thoroughly; he has the knack of "keeping the interest up;" but we leave the book with the feeling that we have been in bad company and with a strong desire for fresh air. (H. S. Stone & Co., Chicago)

The Day of His Youth, by Alice Brown, is a book quite out of the ordinary. It tells the story of a boy brought up in the woods by his fathera man of culture, taste, and feeling, who leaves the world of society upon the death of the wife and mother. The youth never sees a woman until he has come to manhood, and then, naturaly, falls in love with the first he sees, wooes her with ardor and purity of passion, follows her into the conventional world, in the end is jilted by her, and returns to the forest only to bury his father, whose summons home he had ignored in the intensity of his grief. This is the barest outline of what is really a poetic fancy worked out with originality, bearing every mark of a

strong yet delicate imaginative faculty, and written with distinct charm of style. It is well now and then to have a little clear idealism to set against the somewhat turgid realism of contemporary fiction. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Bostor.)

Mr. Edmund P. Dole, the Assistant AttorneyGeneral of Hawaii and author of an excellent book called "Talks about Law," makes clever use of his legal knowledge in his novel The StandBy in following the imaginary ins and outs of a great legal struggle bet veen prohibitionists and liquor-dealers in a New England village which has long been under the control of a brewer (by far the best character in the book) who is rich, generous, a good citizen in most ways, but an unscrupulous and determined leader of the antiprohibition forces. The history of the struggle is told with decided vigor and raciness. This is much the best attempt we have ever seen to carry on propagation of prohibition principles in the form of fiction. The element of romance i found in the love story of the daughter of the brewer and a young prohibition leader and editor, the hero of the book, and the "Stand-By" of all that is sound and true. (The Century Company, New York.) Saint Eva, by Amelia Pain (wife of the well-known English writer of clever short sketches, Barry Pain), is slow to arouse the reader's interest, sad in its development, and tragic in its end. The character of the heroine, Eva, is brought out with skill, and the book is free from vulgarity or obtrusive faults of any kind. (Haiper & Brothers, New York.)--Mrs. Burton Harrison has gathered several studies of New York society life, with two or three stories of a different kind, into a volume called The Merry Maid of Arcady, His Lordship, and Other Stories. The first and last of these (the latter a burlesque but amusing sketch of a wife-seeking English lordling in America) give the double title to the book, and are decidedly the best included in the volume, which, by the way, is an odd and rather unhandy specimen of book-making. (Lamson, Wolffe & Co., Boston.)

Tracked by a Tattoo, by Fergus Hume, is an ingenious detective story with absolutely no literary merit. Mr. Hume follows Mr. Conan Doyle's footsteps in this kind of literature-at a distance. (F. Warne & Co., New York.)-Much better in style and execution is Max Pemberton's Christine of the Hills, a tale of Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands, of fierce passion and strange tragedy. (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.)

The possibility of a wife of strong womanly nature developing in her husband character, purpose, and love is clearly shown in An Inheritance, by Harriet Prescott Spofford. (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.) The story is laid in a mountain town in Massachusetts. The principal characters are a doctor and his wife. The latter discovers during the honeymoon that she had been married for her money, and that her husband drank to

excess.

To save her husband from himself, to do the work he had left undone, is the purpose of a life lived wholly within itself. A family with an ancestry, homestead, portraits, heirlooms, and an inheritance of insanity form the accessories to a plot which reveals the inconsistencies in characters moral because shielded from temptation.

Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement, by Mr. William Courtney Watts (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York), will probably prove interesting in local color to some Kentuckians, but to the rest of the world we fear that it will consist only of four hundred and ninety pages of commonplaccness, related in a style so stilted as to be humorous if one is not obliged to read the entire book.

Iu Golden Shackles, by "Alien" (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York), tells of a remarkable father, who cripples his small son. In bitterness of spirit he decides that it will be a relief to discover gold, and disappears with a smaller daughter. The career of the latter in a miners' camp is sketched in no very attractive style, but it is easy to see that the author means well enough. The book is an exception to many published nowadays in that it is entirely moral.

Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer is a woman of such general ability and such excellent training with her pen that one is not surprised to find her deserting the field of the cathedral and of art for fiction. Nor is one surprised, in looking at the four short stories contained in the little volume One Man Who Was Content (The Century Company, New York), to discover that she has brought freshness of feeling, vividness of description, and a thorough knowledge of the life with which she deals.

Mrs. Amelia E. Barr is at her best when she deals in any way with seafaring people; the instinct for the sea is evidently in Mrs. Barr's blood; her imagination is inspired by it, her poetic sense vivified, and her descriptive power stimulated by contact with the sea in any form. Her latest story, Prisoners of Conscience, appeals to the two instincts which are strongest in her nature-the love of the sea and the instinct for religion. It is a story of exceptional power, and it deals with a motive which Mrs. Barr thoroughly understands. Her people are the Shetland fisherfolk, brought up in the strictest kind of Calvinism, and believing in it literally and with absolute, unquestioning faith. Mrs. Barr works out the destiny of three people under the awful cloud of a fatalistic faith, and she shows how, in the end, a higher and finer type of Christianity prevails over the lower, harder, and narrower type which has made conscience, not a force that guides, but one that binds and imprisons. If the story has a fault, it is to be found in the absence of shading; it is almost too powerful; the strain is at times. too great. In originality, freshness of feeling, and genuine literary force, Mrs. Barr has written nothing better. (The Century Company, New York.)

Mr. F. Frankfort Moore attempted a very difficult and dangerous thing in The Jessamy Bride. He set out to reproduce a group of the bestknown men and women of the last century-the group which centered around Dr. Johnson, which included Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, and two or three famous actresses, Goldsmith's "Jessamy Bride" being, of course, as the title of the book indicates, the central figure. Mr. Moore has attempted to imitate the conversation of some of the best-known talkers in the bistory of English literature. He has not been in every case entirely successful, and yet his story is, on the whole, a distinct and charming success. His portraiture of Johnson is not very effective, but he succeeds admirably with Garrick and with the "Jessamy Bride." The atmosphere of the story is delightful, and one forgets its defects in its freshness of sentiment and sweetness of tone. (Herbert S. Stone & Co., Chicago.)

RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL

The Self-Pronouncing Sunday-School Teacher'. Combination Bible, which bears the imprint of the National Publishing Company (239 Levant Street, Philadelphia), shows the changes, additions, and omissions made by the revisers in King James's Version, thus presenting at a glance the differences between the two versions. It also contains helps of all kinds to the study of the Bible, a concordance, maps, and a subject index. The text follows that of the Oxford Bible. The book is printed from an unusually large, clear type, is bound with flexible covers, and appears to be in every way a very satisfactory piece of book-making. Its advantages to the student and teacher are obvious.

Dr. Newman Smyth's Place of Death in Evolution (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York) is reserved for later notice.- -The second edition of Archbishop Ireland's The Church and Modern Society has appeared. (D. H. McBride & Co., Chicago.)- -A memoir of the late John Hopkins Morison has just been published by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, and is an interesting biography, not only to the friends of the late Dr. Morison, to all those who live in Milton, Mass., and to Unitarians generally, but to those who would read about the quiet, normal development of Christian civilization in New England from the beginning of this century to the present time.

-Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, well known as the author of many books for girls, has now published a book which she dedicates to her grand

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hiding against all finding, but only a safe-covering for a sure, continual bringing forth." In this spirit Mrs. Whitney relates the early Old Testament stories, and earnestly seeks to strike through the surface at the truth and unity which lie below. The House of Dreams (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York), by an anonymous author, is one of those books of which we have not too many. It is dreamful, of course, but its dreams are of that graphic sort which live with us in the daytime as well as in the night-time, of that sort which bring not only spiritual comfort, strength, and rest in hours of meditation, but go with us in the other hours of activity or endurance and make character.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Captain A. T. Mahan's The Life of Nelson really rounds out and is the logical development of his two great works on "The Influence of Sea Power." It is safe to say that no recent work of biography has been more eagerly looked forward to, and in England the book has already been greeted with enthusiasm as masterly and comprehensive. We shall, of course, review it at some length at an early da'e. (Little, Brown & Co., Boston.)

We reserve for later notice the Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, by Messrs Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell. (E. P. Catton & Co., New York.)

TRAVEL, ETC.

Mr. Richard Harding Davis has put into book form some of the newspaper letters written on his recent visit to Cuba, and has added there'o information about the situation in Cuba suggested by many questions asked him since his return. He is a warm advocate of interference by the United States solely on the ground of humanity, and he cites the reports of our consuls in Cuba to sustain his charges of wanton cruelty by the Spanish authorities. We agree with Mr. Davis that the United States should be thoroughly informed of the facts before interference, and we earnestly hope that our pre.ent State Department will not only obtain full, accurate, and impartial knowledge, but that it will lay it before the country. (R. H. Russell, New York.)

Sketch's Awheel in Modern Iberia is a fairly readable record of a bicycle trip through Spain made two years ago by a husband and wifeWilliam H. and Fanny B. Workman. This is a wheeling trip not often taken, because of the badness of Spanish roads. The authors had an opportunity to see many places not often visited by tourists, and to see the people near at hand and under familiar conditions. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.)

LITERATURE

The third edition of Mr. Edmund Gosse's Seventeenth Century Studies does not receive any important addition in the way of positive knowl

edge, although it receives some correction of exuberance of feeling in the preface. Exuberance of feeling is now, however, so uncommon among writers of purely literary themes that it is quite pardonable, not to say distinctly enjoyable. The book deals with Lodge, Webster, Herrick, Crashaw, Cowley, Otway, and a few minor writers, in Mr. Gosse's well-known style-a style which never conveys the impression of spontaneity, but which is generally clear, informative, and satisfactory. Moreover, Mr. Gosse understands his field thoroughly; he is an indefatigable, although he has not always been an entirely accurate, student. His work shows in all essential details, however, great care, trained intelligence, and sound taste. (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.)

To the Temple Classics have been added the second volume of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, and the first volume of Florio's translation of the Essayes of Montaigne. It was a happy thought on the part of the editor of this series to reprint this notable Elizabethan translation of one of the classics in the world's literature. (The Macmillan Company, New York.)

Mark Twain is better known as a humorist and a story-teller than as an essayist, but his publishers, Messrs. IIarper & Brothers, have put together eight of his essays under the title How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, and included them in the very interesting series of American Essays which they are now giving to the public. These essays are, as one might anticipate, of a somewhat miscellaneous character, so far as subjects are concerned, and yet they are not without their literary atmosphere and references. "How to Tell a Story," "In Defense of Harriet Shelley," and "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," show the student of literature as well as the original writer and humorist; but the priva'e history of the Jumping Frog story takes us into the field which Mark Twain has made peculiarly his own. Two essays are devoted to M. Paul Bourget, about whom and to whom Mr. Clemens has some interesting and suggestive things to say.

Again this week Messrs. Ginn & Co., of Boston, send us another of their valuable publications, on the cover of which they have thought well to put the name of the editor, but not that of the author. The publication is a reprint, with notes, of La Pierre de Touche-a comedy by Émile Augier in collaboration with Jules Sandeau. The name of the editor, however, Dr. Harper, of Princeton University, deserves prominent enough place, since his introduction to the play is one of the best essays on the modern French drama which we have read. No one else has so clearly drawn the dis.inction between the plays of dramatists like Alexander Dumas fils and those of an Émile Augier. From the first, we have plays about life as one suspects it; from the latter, as one sees it; with the first, comedy is a reflection of the half-world merely; with the latter, a reflec tion of the whole world.

THE FINE ARTS

Mr. George Iles is the general editor of the admirably annotated lists of the American Library Association (Boston). The Association now publishes in an attractive volume a Bibliography of Fine Art. Mr. Russell Sturgis has charge of the departments of painting, sculpture, architecture, decoration, and illustration, and Mr. Henry Edward Krehbiel edits that of music. We note some regrettable omissions; for instance, justice is not done to all the works of John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater; but these omissions are rare exceptions. The descriptive, critical, and comparative notes are excellent, and the volume is sure to be of great value. glad to learn that an appendix may shortly be issued by Mr. Iles to his "Readers' Guide to Economic, Social, and Political Science."

OUT-OF-DOORS

We are

The author of Nature in a City Yard, Mr. Charles M. Skinner, seems to be a happy combination of John Burroughs, Charles Dudley Warner, and H. C. Bunner, and he has succeeded in producing a book which would reflect credit on the collaboration of those skilled picturers of nature and life. With his John Burroughs pen he writes of the flowers, plants, insects, and sky effects that may be studied and enjoyed in a city

back yard; then he cips into the Warner inkstand and gives us occasional descriptions of "that McGonigle Boy," with a running comment of modern philosophy from the urban point of view; and he introduces a Jersey peddler and other peripatetic street characters with all the gayety and precision of Mr. Bunner. It is decidedly a book for city lovers of country life to 1ead. (The Century Company, New York.)

EDUCATIONAL

Miss Mary R. Alling-Aber's An Experiment in Education (Harper & Brothers, New York) is an account of certain methods of teaching children which were tested in a private school in Boston, and later in a public school at Englewood, Ill. They were made in the hope of discovering how far the traditional methods of teaching children are responsible for the defects of mental life which come to the surface later. The volume is a very suggestive contribution to current educational literature.

MISCELLANEOUS

The

The Talks to Young Men and the Talks to Young Women, by the R- v. Charles H. Parkhurst, which appeared in 1896 in the "Ladies' Home Journal" have been published in two nat volumes by the Century Company, New York. "Talks to Young Women aroused some feeling. when published, on account of Dr. Parkhurst's position on the woman's suffrage question; many women who oppose the extension of the franchise resented the position taken by Dr. Parkhurst. His analysis of the women who advocate the extension of the suffrage to women

seemed unfair. There are women, womanly women, who ask for the ballot in a sirit of deep unselfishness; they believe it would improve the condition of wage earning women, and give the poor man's home a larger share in the decisions of the Government. They advocate woman's suffrage while they shrink from the personal responsibility it imposes. All the "manly women," to quote Dr. Parkhurst, are not found on one side of this question, nor all the womanly women on the other. On the subject of college education for womer, Dr. Parkhurst should study more closely the history of the higher education of women, of women's colleges, and co-educational institutions of learning. He seems to have allowed preconceived opinions to control his judg ment after some investigation into the subject The Talks to Young Men" is a most valuable book; every man, young or old, will gain a new purpose, perceive a new revelation of the place he should fill in the world, and God's purpose in creating him. Dr. Parkhurst knows man, his strength and his weakness. The author of these "Talks" is too earnest and sincere a man to have approached the subjects he treats of in these books in other than a reverent spirit. Where he knows whereof he speaks, the world is better for knowledge his touch is uncertain. what he has written; where he has only partial

Mr. F. G. Aflalo is the editor of The Literary Year-Book, 1897. (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.) It is a pity that American authors, publishers, and booksellers are not represent:d, to a larger extent in this publication. Nor does the volume meet all the requirements of a comprehensive work of reference in British literary matters. So far as it goes, nevertheless, the book seems well done, and the various tables and directories are not too dry reading, for sandwiched among them are some good portraits and biographical sketches.

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