Co.), to which Major Gen. Leonard Wood contributes a prefatory note of appreciation, is a brief study of the character and career of the great French General, the hero of Verdun, and the commander-in-chief of the French armies, written with a view to emphasizing and illustrating the great lesson of individual preparedness for all the duties and crises of life. It is a lesson well worth learning, alike in peace and war, and it is enforced in this little book with an arresting earnestness.

A compact, comprehensive and detailed description of "Trench Warfare" (E. P. Dutton & Co.) furnishes precisely the information most needed by American expeditionary troops on their way to France. It is written by J. S. Smith, Second Lieutenant with the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders-an American who has seen thirty-one months of actual service in trench warfare, and is now with the British force on the French front. It describes every detail of trench construction and trench fighting, and the cuts and diagrams with which it is illustrated make it an invaluable manual alike for officers and men.

That the wives of the last generation were, practically, murdered by excessive child-bearing, and that the husbands of this generation are practically murdered in the struggle for money to meet the demands of childless, restless women, "driven by sex idleness to self-destruction," is the double thesis maintained by the anonymous author of "The Empty House." The book will not be to the taste of readers who feel that when spades are to be called spades, it can be done more satisfactorily by a physician than by a novelist. But it is fluently written, and the chapters describing the financial ups and downs of the

It is a long, long way from the country wagon and stage coach, as means of mail delivery, to the railroad and aeroplane, but in his volume on "The United States Post Office" (Funk & Wagnalls Co.) Daniel C. Roper, First Assistant Postmaster General, 1913-1916, traverses the interval, and describes, with an expert's knowledge, and in a manner delightfully clear and intensely absorbing, every step in the progress made, and every detail in the postal service, as at present conducted. The opening chapters emphasize the connection between the postal service and civilization, and review the history of that service in the colonial days, through its early development after the Revolution, up to the first modern postal legislation in 1845, and the introduction of postage stamps in 1847. The body of the book is devoted to a graphic account of present-day methods and improvements, especially the extension of rural free delivery, the institution of postal savings banks, and the rapid growth of the parcel post. The final chapter will appeal especially to philatelists. Twenty or more full-page illustrations from photographs decorate the book.

A succession of unpleasant experiences has led the novel-reader of fastidious taste to look askance at the "studies of adolescence" so popular with publishers, and his worst fears will be realized if he has the ill luck to take up "Young Low." The author, George A. Dorsey, describes in the first person, the erotic development of an Ohio boy, born on the Pike; brought up on a farm; educated at a small college; trading with Indians; teaching in an Ohio Academy; taking a postgraduate course at Harvard; accom

panying a Natural History expedition to South America; and traveling for two years as a private tutor in France, Italy and Egypt. By untiring efforts of his own, the hero is able to counteract the impression made on his young mind by the narrowness of his parents, pastors and college professors, and he begins his career as a traveling man by taking to himself a mistress with easy nonchalance; at the Academy he is irresistibly impelled to kiss a student behind a door, and to "grab" a pretty teacher "like a wild beast"; in Lima, after a chapter or two of argument pro and con, he agrees with a purveyor of young girls to send one to his hotel, and is then so affected by the child's naked innocence that he returns her to her mother; at Harvard he falls in love with a neglected wife, and later, becomes her paramour while tutoring her children, who admire him prodigiously. But for a few good descriptive passages, the book is without a redeeming feature. George H. Doran Co.

L. M. Montgomery, author of "Anne of Green Gables," "Anne of Avonlea," etc. adds to this popular and wholesome series "Anne's House of Dreams," in which are described the opening years of Anne's happy married life. Her young doctor -an old acquaintance to readers of the earlier books-carries her only sixty miles from Green Gables, to Four Winds, where he has found for them a quaint little white house, looking toward the sunset and the great blue harbor, with a big grove of fir-trees behind it, and two rows of Lombardy poplars down the lane. There they make a group of new friends: Captain Jim, the lighthouse keeper, whose cheery philosophy divides the honors with the tart cynicism of Miss Cornelia, the man-hating spinster; Marshall Elliott, vowed not to

shave his beard nor cut his hair till the Liberals come into power; and beautiful Leslie Moore, tragically unhappy, who is the real heroine of the plot. The Prince Edward Island scenery is described with the enthusiasm of one who loves it. Frederick A. Stokes Co.

"The joyful years are those when you are finding yourselves, children," says the middle-aged novelist who plays the part first of lover and then of fairy godfather in F. T. Wawn's story, "The Joyful Years." Its charming heroine, Cynthia Bremner, is introduced with three lovers, Shaun James, the novelist, who is forming her taste for books and pictures; Laurence Man, who holds a substantial position with the Great Company, and is favored by Lady Bremner, and Peter Middleton, a young clerk in the Company, whose only claim to the Bremner's hospitality is a school friendship between his dead father, Major Middleton, and Sir Everard. The book is essentially a love-story, but Peter's ups and downs in the offices of the Company give variety, and in the closing chapters the scene changes to the battlefields of France. The plot is unfolded in leisurely fashion, with the introduction of many minor characters-among them a suffragette with whom Cynthia's brother is in love and with fascinating descriptions of Cornwall and Wales, and whimsical philosophizing on life and art. Perhaps it might have been shortened to advantage, but the human interest is kept well in the foreground, and the digressions are all delightful. Altogether, the story is of unusual quality, and even the doubts and hesitations of its principal characters will be refreshing to readers who have had a surfeit of heroes and heroines absolutely without moral fastidiousness. E. P. Dutton & Co.