enter the legislature, to speak on behalf of his own people; but Wi will have none of it; he wants to go into the Church; "there is nothing that messes up a race so much as want of religion," he says, “I am going to pass my knowledge on to my people." But while he is studying in the seminary, Wi so far forgets his dusky skin as to fall in love with a Little White Girl, and tragedy follows. "How can I believe your Bible that does not speak truth?" asks Wi. "It calls all men equal. The black and white are meant to be two people forever. And your faith teaches that they are one. Then is your faith false? This has eaten into me until it has eaten all my faith away. I will go to my own gods. They are many, and I can cut new ones out of wood if I like. But I think that I will not believe in them either."

The trick of pitching an unpretentious story in just the right key is rare.

"Lady Bobs, Her Brother And I."

enough to entitle Jean Chamblin's placid little idyl of the Azores, Lady Bobs, Her Brother and I, to a word or two of cordial commendation. It would be needless irony to question the likelihood of Lady Bobs, Brother George, and the DeGray Streeter girl, who made all the trouble, severally turning up at Ponta Delgada, whither the narrator, known to us only as Kate, has gone in quest of seclusion and forgetfulness. Likelihood is not an essential ingredient of this sort of bright, vivacious, guide-book fiction. All you want is a light, running comment upon strange, picturesque places and people, a sense of blue sky, tropical vegetation and human gladness; and two young people, temporarily estranged, yet obviously quite ready to be reconciled as soon as a favourable opportunity occurs. Of course, there are readers who would question whether this kind of fiction is worth doing at all; but if it is worth doing, then it should be done with Miss Chamblin's sustained note of lightness.

There is an old-fashioned type of plot that at one time was worn well-nigh threadbare; it was a favourite, one recalls, of the "Duchess" and "Rita;" it was not unknown to "Ouida;" it formed the keynote of Georges Ohnet's first popular

"The

Professor's

Legacy."

success, the Maître de Forges. Through an infinite variety of minor details, the essential features were always the same. The woman always loved, or thought she loved, some one else than the man she was persuaded to marry. The husband remained blind to her lack of love until just after the ceremony. Then came her confession, his reproaches, and an estrangement carefully hidden from the world. It takes two or three chapters for her to discover that her husband is, after all, the man she loves-and a dozen chapters, at least, to convince him of her change of heart. The Professor's Legacy, by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, is the latest example of this type of fiction. It is better than most of its kind, in being rather carefully done, the characters being drawn with a care that makes them seem real, and the background filled in with suggestive little touches that help one to see. But that does not alter the fact that it is the same old plot, warmed over and served up under a new name. The best thing about it is that from the opening chapter it leaves you not in the least doubt as to what sort of a book you have before you.

Another old-time plot, worn so thin and shabby that even the most skilful rip

"Rose

o' the River."

ping and turning and refurbishing with bright bits of local colour cannot give it a look of newness, is Rose o' the River, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. The silly country girl, who fails to see true. worth clothed in homespun, and mistakes a vulgar-minded salesman from a Boston department store for a sort of fairy prince, because he wears kid gloves and a loud necktie-all this we have had many times before, in Sunday-school stories and elsewhere. The author of Rebecca has a touch which goes a long way towards putting new dignity and beauty into the cheapest of material, but even she must have felt the flimsiness of her latest effort. The obvious little story moves forward to its obvious little end, when the silly little girl goes back to her honest homespun lover, who has all the time kept a modest little house waiting for her

in the heart of the northern woods. The vivid glimpses of life among the lumbermen are the best feature of a book which surely must have made its way on the strength of its predecessor, Rebecca, rather than on its own merits.

a Thousand Candles."

If there is any one kind of story that needs to be told "just so," in order to pass muster at all, it is "The House of the story involving an element of mystery and ghostliness. The difference is that of jumping across a chasm, instead of upon level ground. In the one case you may land short of your mark; in the other, you land nowhere at all. The House of a Thousand Candles, by Meredith Nicholson, may be cited as an example, not of an author who has fallen into the chasm, but of one who landed so near to the edge, with such a desperate scramble for a footing, that there need not be much elation at his success. There is an old ghost story, told with many variations, but always beginning with a haunted house that is offered rent-free to the adventurous person who will spend one night in it quite alone. Mr. Nicholson goes the old ghost story one better. His hero is required to spend not one night, but a whole year, in the isolated house, which, according to his grandfather's will, shall then become his. But if he violates the terms of the will, the house goes to a young woman of whom he has never heard, and whom the will, furthermore, forbids him to marry. He has not been in the mysterious house half an hour when the melodrama begins. He is shot at from just outside the parlour window, the bullet flattening itself on the wall and accommodatingly bounding back upon the table before him, so that he may examine it without trouble. Add to this a swiftly moving sequence of hidden dangers, ghostly footsteps passing up and down through solid walls, enemies that enter at night through subterranean passages, and a beautiful neighbour, who seems one day to favour him, and the next to be in league with his secret foes -with such elaborate machinery for a gruesome, uncanny story, the wonder is, not that Mr. Nicholson did passably well, but that he did not do a good deal better.

Perhaps it would help him to cultivate the art of telling a tale “just so."

"The Ancient Grudge."

It is a pleasure, occasionally, to take up a book written with the ability, the intelligent sympathy, the serious purpose that stamp the new volume by Arthur Stanwood Pier, The Ancient Grudge. There are two young men, whom fate seems to have designed to be close friends for life. Each of them has qualities which win the other's admiration; they go to the same college, they are classmates, roommates, members of the same fraternity; later in life, their active interests bring them to dwell in the same city, their lives are interwoven in a dozen different ways. But far back in the past, one of these men saved the other from drowning, and ever since, the other has felt the burden of this obligation, which he can never hope to pay, grow heavier and heavier, until he comes to hate the one to whom he owes his life. As already said, the whole book is an unusually careful piece of work. The Harvard chapters are taken straight out of life. So also are the chapters in the big steel works, where Floyd Halket serves his apprenticeship, before his grandfather advances him to be general superintendent of the works. Floyd is the man who saved the life of Stewart Lee. Stewart later becomes an architect and marries the woman that Floyd has loved for years. An obligation that one cannot pay weighs heavily upon any man; but it is only a mean-spirited man who would hate his rescuer, as Stewart hates Floyd. Perhaps the best feature in the book is the way in which we are made to feel, under the surface glitter of transient popularity and success, the real smallness of Stewart's nature, the secret of his failure as an architect, as a husband, as a man; and on the other hand, the sterling qualities of Floyd's character, that bring him victory at last. Mr. Pier has done some good things in the past, but this book, more than any of the others, goes to prove that, if he has not yet learned how to write a story that is unquestionably "just so," he has advanced a long way in that direction.

Frederic Taber Cooper.

CHAPTER X

F any Diogenes person meets in Gubbio a man with a green crocheted necktie and red cheeks, let him blow out his lantern, for he has found the honest man. Nor is he a man without temptation-he sells gasoline, and by the weight instead of measure, which is the most mysterious way in the world, although cheaper for the buyer than by the litre, providing the dealer's necktie is crocheted, or that he bears other neck marks of uprightness.

But the green necktie man of Gubbio was not content with being honest, he was honest plus, for he kept coming back every half hour with lire, which he had found on weighing and re-weighing the contents of the "demijohna" did not belong to him; and as he would not give the coin to anyone but me, John decided he was paying for another and still another look, which is untrue, though blondes are scarce in Gubbio.

We needed this touch of comedy before our departure, for the Calvo Pass lay before us, and the honest gasoline man, when he learned that our car was only "eighteen horses," lifted his shoulders and his eyebrows. As soon as we had passed the city gates, we were shut in the mountains and on the eight miles of up grade, but so perfect that in many places we mistook it for the level, and switched into the high speed, at which our engine trembled, and was hastily restored to slower pace. The roadbed was good, and only the mountains themselves awesome. We met few carts, but many pedestrians, and reaching Scheggia, the other side of the Pass, found our friend the Via Flaminia waiting to accommodate us.

In spite of the grade down, we thought her a little set up in manner, and discov

ered that she must have but recently carried along a very heavy motor car, for the tracks were fresh. John was delighted. Automobiles are so seldom met with in this locality that a symptom of them like a wheel track stirs the motorist's heart, and as soon as I was sure the tires weren't Mrs. Baring's, I was pleased too. The driver had taken the curves with all the care that John observed, only once going on the outside at a sharp corner, and skidding a bit with a grazed wall as a consequence.

I called John's attention to this, which he had endeavoured to ignore, being already very fond of the driver, and he said the man's wife had probably showed him a pink pigeon. This was the first reference that John had made to the pink pigeon which had happened in Scheggia. It fluttered up to a housetop as we were going through a narrow street packed full of people, and I gave what was meant to be a purely interior gasp of admiration, but it must have been a shriek, an exterior one, for John's eyes followed my finger, and in that minute a little girl, just big enough to toddle, did so, and right in front of the car. No pedestrian realises how quickly a motor car can stop, even when going down a flagged hill, so of course there was a cry from everybody, and one old man sprang for the child, but they both would have been down and the wheels upon them had John been driving horses.

The old man never hesitated, and I thought it was fine in him, for he must have believed the chances more against him than they were. We halted. The wise motorist never turns his back on possible ill-feeling, as it often means a stone between the shoulder blades. And I gave the little one a lira, telling the mother she was surely born for buona fortuna; so the mother was pleased, but we left the old man white-lipped and

scornful of our money, and, as I said before, John made that one single reference to the pink pigeon. Those are not the incidents of motoring that a man cares to dwell upon. But really, did anyone ever hear before of a pink pigeon?

We stopped at Cagli for luncheon, that is, the car stopped in the street below, and we continued up several flights of steps before we found it. Then it was very poor, and I think the radiator of the motor got the best of us, for whenever I looked down upon it, little boys were discovered poking bread crumbs through the coils. They may have thought there was some animal behind the bars that furnished the power, or possibly it was to lead me into believing that they didn't jump upon the tires when we weren't watching. Pommelling the tires in the hope of making some impression is supposed to be great fun, and is prevented only by the administration of the shawl strap.

The shawl strap was not purchased with any such malevolent thought, but it has been put to that use, and serves equally well in keeping hordes of the escorting, who follow in our wake, from riding up the steep streets in the shadow of our big trunk. They are very cunning about this, too, and when I arise in my wrath and swirl the shawl strap, slip off quickly and pretend to push, climbing largess for the assistance upon arrival at the hotel.

This is but a small grievance, although it touches upon the most disagreeable element of motoring in Italy: the enforced expenditure for service, and often for rooms and food, beyond the usual price. To be sure, the best rooms, the best food, and the most exaggerated attention is ours, from the first to the last toot of the horn. To be sure, barring the price of the gasoline (from three to five times the cost in America), our bills are about onehalf what they would be travelling in the States, and the cooking and comfort infinitely better than that of our country hotels.

And it is not so much that we must pay more than we should, but that we cannot pay enough to satisfy the exaggerated ideas that the country people entertain of the prodigality of Americans,

particularly of Americans who motor, for the car in Europe is enjoyed only by the wealthiest classes. It hurts John and me a little, fond as we are of these people, and remembering their pleasure with our modest tips on former visits, to see them fingering their goodly pour boire with scorn or astonishment. They must expect a rain of gold, and possibly they take their disappointment better than would we under the circumstances, for they generally line up to bid us buon viaggio with at least an assumption of good will. I fear if Silas of New England thought the voyagers were rather mean, he would be out in the stable kicking the horse at the hour of their departure.

But I have no good word for the Cagli signora's luncheon, which was poor at its best, though had it been excellent at its worst, it was an astounding price-a dollar ninety if you please for Italy. Moreover, she was deaf to our abuses, and lacking proper change, we were obliged to pay her. We did it bitterly, and bitterly did the signora rue it, for as we were piling our books into the basket, the red Baedeker struck my eye, and waving it before her I told the withering cheat that with the next edition she would be exposed-I, Baedeker, had spoken. At this development of the plot, the most dramatic situation in the life of an European inn-keeper, she withdrew our ten lire piece from her purse and besought us to accept it, but we were deaf to her entreaties, and stalked on. I hope Baedeker will forgive me. It was something to have refused the money, and in the face of his anger I recommend no traveller to climb stone steps for Cagli luncheons.

We were immediately softened when beyond the gates. The landscape was the kind that is known as melting. We melted with it, and continued in this jelly state until Urbino greeted us. Heights are elegant for thoughts, but I find that John and I take our views differently. He looks down into the valley with satisfaction, seeing how high we've climbed, and this is called the Automobile Spirit, while I float around in the clouds all alone with my soul, and have delightful sensations looking back at my poor body with its turned-up nose (my soul has a fine nose) and thinking how easy it is