My Poor Relations*

In Maarten Maartens's stories of Dutch peasant life, the author has presented. some of his best efforts. One of them is "In the Summer Christmas," of which Mr. Maartens says, "it is an old story, forgotten long ago, I think, in that quiet corner of the world which saw it happen * * * because the soft voice of the teller must ever be to me the music of the tale. For me alone is this; why should I intrude it upon others? To them it will be a passing incident, paid for (a tenth part of a sixpence) sliced between two others, yawned over for five minutes, and forgot.'

Mr. Maartens does himself and the story an injustice. It will not be yawned over, neither will it be instantly forgotten. Wooing of Salina Suet

The author of "The Second Wooing of Salina Sue" is a Southern woman who has made a close study of the foibles, follies and idiosyncrasies of the elusive colored race. The tales show evidence of keen appreciation of the complex conditions of the mind and brain of our dark-hued brother and sister, their contradictory actions, their absurd inconsistencies, and the inexplicable, inborn conceit of these children of darkness.

Little Stories of Courtship

Mrs. Cutting has reversed the usual order. She wrote "Little Stories of Married Life" first; she now offers "Little Stories of Courtship." These evidence an equal familiarity with the thorns which beset the feet of the unwary, the trivial misunderstandings, heartaches and bliss of those whom Cupid has called upon to join

his ranks.

Courtships of Men*

Mr. Martin, author of "The Courtship of a Careful Man," is a humorous writer. This may not be his ambition or intention. Indeed, he seems to take his characters rather seriously, but they are all of a type prone to arouse the risibilities of that scant number who have what might be termed a "perverted sense of humor.'

For example, in "A Party at Madiera's,' given in New York with much eclat, the immense gathering is in reality a coterie collected from Oshkosh to Bangor, all "personages" to be sure, and of consequence, but not New Yorkers. Mrs. Wilson, for instance, upon commenting upon the guests with her host, with the freedom of old acquaintanceship, says feelingly: "But I am going to be buried in Worcester. I'd rather be buried in some permanent place."

Mr. Pennycook's Boy†

Dialect stories, it must be confessed, however well told, are not easy reading, and Mr. Bell's are no exception to the general rule. Yet they are cleverly told. They all present some skilfully woven tale about some distinct motif. They are humorous at intervals, cumbrously so at times, but sympathetic always.

Twelve Stories and a Dream‡

Mr. Wells is prolific. He has written not only short stories, but romances, novels and sociological essays as well. The twelve stories in the present volume are of varied theme and quality. The opening tale deals with a great inventor, albeit an inconceivable coward. Story II is of a Magic Shop, of too imaginative an order of the impossible. to reach any but a child who loves tales

"The Valley of Spiders" is the sort of story one reads and wishes with all one's print. Spiders may be interesting to those heart people would not write-least of all of a scientific turn of mind, who study reading to be told that a man is pursued them in the abstract, but it is not pleasant by spiders measuring a foot across.

*THE COURTSHIP OF A CAREFUL MAN AND A FEW OTHER COURTSHIPS. By E. S. Martin. Harper & Bros.

MR. PENNYCOOK'S BOY. By J. J. Bell. Harper & Bros.

TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM. By H. G. Wells. Charles Scribner's Sons.

The remaining stories are couched in Mr. Wells's usual manner, closing with "A Dream of Armageddon," the gem of the collection.

Fond Adventures*

Perhaps Mr. Hewlett's greatest successes were "Richard Yea-and-Nay," and "The Queen's Quair," but he likewise has the rare gift of clothing the children of his fancy in the lighter garb of "short fiction." His is a surpassing gift-his woof is woven into a tapestry, softly colored, brilliant in conception, and happy in effect. His characters stand boldly forth, from a background of carefully blended hues, and trend their way through perils, battles and sudden death, with a certainty born of many ages.

There are but four short stories in this volume but they are all four of the same "stuff" which made up his larger successes: "The Heart's Key," a mediæval story of love and its reward; "Brazenhead the Great," a story of intrigue and churchly environment: "Buondelmonte's Saga," a pathetic tale of a mother's ambition, and "The Love Chase."

At Close Ranget

Mr. Smith says, as a result of using his microscope, not only on the cutting of intaglios, or the brushmarks of miniatures, but also on the emotions of human beings, that "at the bottom of every heart, crucible choked with life's cinders, there can almost always be found a drop of gold."

This "drop of gold" glistens and radiates light through all the nine short stories in this collection. "A Night Out" is told *FOND ADVENTURES. By Maurice Hewlett. Harper & Bros.

†AT CLOSE RANGE. By F. Hopkinson Smith. Charles Scribners' Sons.

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by a traveling man-a lecturer-immune to discomfort, and appreciatively alive to an oasis of comfort. He is a man of the nicest kind of humor. His laugh comes from his heart. He is the sort women love, children trust-men seek as a friend.

"Simple Folk" is woven about a lifesaving station. "Old Sunshine" holds tears and smiles, mostly tears. The closing story, "A Pot of Jam," is charming.

The Club of Queer Trades*

Rather a misnomer as to title is "The Club of Queer Trades," for it is not until the close of the collection that one learns the meaning. Vocabulary, or even weird ideas, take a great artist to clothe them fittingly, and Mr. Chesterton has not the skill of Mr. Conan Doyle. These stories have vague, gray draperies, a la a Henry James conception. There is much talkwhich gets nowhere. There is an occasional episode which finally reaches the bewildered reader, who has been wondering, if she or he reads on—“what next?” The author says of "Basil" in the opening story: "Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of color in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds."

Banal? But it expresses the entire tenor of these tales. B. J. ROTART. *THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES. By Gilbert K. Chesterton. Harper & Bros.

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An Enticing Book*

NE reader, just "dropping into" its pages, became entirely oblivious of letters to be written and various other agenda; she read on and on till at one sitting she had read more than half through the book, of more than four hundred and twenty pages. The word "lore" in the title is a fascinating one, opening up, as it does, mental vistas in which the mind disports itself at ease. No deep, knotty problems to be solved, no subtle meanings to be penetrated—just some entertaining, gossipy talk about birds and their ways, the beliefs, legends, the superstitions that have in the course of ages clustered about them. The author, well known from his historical studies, in this book aims to create an interest in birds by describing their homes and haunts, their times and seasons, their eggs and their nests, their notes and their food, their loves and their hates, their merry courtships and their parental anxieties, and their still more imperious instincts of migration—to penetrate behind the graceful shape, the lissom movements, the beautiful mask of feathers, to the eager little life, vivid, atractive, mysterious, almost but not quite impenetrable, which underlies them all. The sympathy with these bright little creatures, once aroused, he thinks, "will give a kind of sixth sense to its possessor, lending a fresh charm to every walk."

The birds which he describes most fully, the owl, the raven, the magpie, the rook, the jackdaw, the cuckoo and a few others, are those which "have had the most enduring influence on the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, and the outlookings of man." The raven appears in literary history as far back as the time of Cain. He it was who taught the first murderer to bury the body of his brother. He has a part in the recorded history and legends of the early Romans. He is the sacred bird of Odin; there are legends connect

*BIRD LIFE AND BIRD LORE. By Bosworth Smith. Illustrated. E. P. Dutton & Co.

ing him with Arthur and Mount Badon, with the last long sleep of the great Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. He appears in every other of Shakespeare's dramas, in Dickens' pages, in the most weird and eerie of Poe's ballads. The raven has

presaged every misfortune-and how many there have been-to the present royal House of Hapsburg. In the Hein brew Bible, in the Koran, and the legends of saints and martyrs, he is the friend and provider of the faithful.

But want of space forbids more than to say that we are made acquainted with an old manor house and rectory, deep embowered in shade, the like of which exists not elsewhere than in England. It is with these as a centre that most of these studies of "Bird Life and Bird Lore" connect themselves. M. L.

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TORIES of all sorts of animals have

been popular for the last several years, and the book market has become well stocked with the life-stories of bears, wolves, birds, and even frogs. Most of these stories, while based upon actual facts, are filled in with much material from the author's imagination. In "Wasps, Social and Solitary," by George W. and Elizabeth G. Peckham, we have stories of the lives of wasps, based upon observation and experiment, which have, as John Burroughs says in his introduction to the book, "all the interest of a romance."

The Peckhams are reliable authorities; they stand high as scientific investigators, and have written this delightful history of their studies of wasps in an untechnical form, so that their circle of readers may increase from the scientific to the general reading public. The book has the rare advantage of being a popular Nature book, and at the same time a reliable scientific reference book.

*WASPS-SOCIAL AND SOLITARY. By George W. and Elizabeth G. Peckham. Illustrated. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

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The Celibates' Club*

HIS is two books in one, containing "the united stories of The Bachelors' Club and The Old Maids' Club." The subject permits Mr. Zangwill to "hit off" with his customary clever satire modern fads of society and litera

ture. The Bachelors' Club consists chiefly of artists, litterateurs and philosophers, each of whom finally marries or is discovered to have been secretly married during club membership. It takes twelve long chapters to effect the dissolution of the club, one chapter to each member. The Old Maids' Club, on the other hand, exists to reject fair applicants, and goes into dissolution when its founder and sole member, Lillie Dulcimer, marries her old suitor and trusted Trier of club aspirants, Lord Silverdale.

Mr. Zangwill has selected a field of illimitable humor. The characteristic Zangwill dialectic, the Zangwill pun, and the Zangwill satire for the sake of satire, are the chief distinctions of the novel, Master of a style peculiarly his own, clever as always in the choice of word and idea, brilliant in suggestion, the author in this work has not only run the entire gamut of mirth and rollicking fun, but has incidentally exposed to folly many absurd shams and unmeaning conventionalities in life.

The tale of the rise of the English Shakespeare, Fladpick, inimitable in execution, is a merciless satire on a gullible literary public; while Dr. Fogson's finding of his long preconceived, etherealized, and idealized love, Barbara, incarnate in a six months' old baby, cannot be improved upon for an expression of the ludicrous in impractical, so-called scientific, but machine-made, philosophy. These are two of the most brilliant stories in the book. It takes more than six hundred pages for Mr. Zangwill to feel that he has done justice to his stock of humorthe reader is not considered. This is the chief fault in the work. The very profusion of humor induces to ennui. The

*THE CELIBATES' CLUB. By I. Zangwill. The Macmillan Company.

numerous illustrations by George Hutchinson, and F. H. Townsend, are of uniform excellence. G. E. R.

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Widdicombe*

HIS novel of life in the west of England country gives to the reviewer somewhat the feeling of one looking at a landscape painting of singular beauty and strength of treatment, not precisely marred, yet at the least not enhanced by the addition of figures to its foreground. If such a comment seems to imply futility to the novel as a whole, since there can be no other material save

humanity for the novelist to work in, then must the figure be withdrawn as an unwarranted extremity of criticism; for it is undeniable that the characters have that sombre realism which is apparently inseparable, as Hardy himself has taught us, from a depiction of the local temperament. Not only so, but the development of motives, the clash of evil and good, the grip of the individual with inevitability-all are portrayed with tragic directness and dignity. Indeed, every chief character in the book; complex Sylphinie herself, half spirit, half siren; her two lovers, Repath, sentimentalist, and Ishmael; John Saxon, poet and socialist: Niy and Rosemary, children of passion and innocence-each one seems less a personality than a battleground, a theatre for the conflict of world-old forces.

Yet, notwithstanding, what must inevitably most draw the reader's absorption is this misty west country itself,

a land of many waters for half the year. The lap and swirl of the brown streams and the subtle gurgles of the peat-moss as the bogcotton bows to the on-coming flow, fill the ear with a ceaseless murmur that is full of peace: in summer the slumberous whisper of the heath-bells sounds near the head of Widey water. But while above the wind coming from the moors is keen and breathes of heather and peat, down below the tree roofs the air is heavy with the smell of moss and of fern, the sunlight richly golden, and the cascade of water, cool in the hottest summer days, so murmurously still that the hum of a strayed and belated bee is startling, like a sudden cry of alarm.

*WIDDICOMBE. By M. P. Wilcocks. John

Lane.

This is the special excellence of "Widdicombe," its atmosphere, not lightly to be come at in many seasons of "best sellers," and therefore to be gratefully accepted. H. T. P.

The Black Motor Car*

WE

E were led to expect by the elements of strength that glimmered in "The Princess Thora" a far different work than is here before us in "The Black Motor Car." The star-actor, a faithless husband and a malefactor in general, gains the hatred of a woman, his associate in crime, by his refusal to elope with her; in turn he is betrayed by her and sent to prison for fifteen years. At the end of such time we are presented with an offensive type of mock-tragedian, nourishing a morbid desire for revenge on the woman who was the instrument of his well-earned punishment.

During the fifteen years of inactive service in the world the man's inventive talent is given full power, and a wonderfully conceived machine, "The Black Motor Car," is the result. A search for the woman is begun, and she is discovered in the wife of an English Earl. Then follow a series of adventures that beggar the extravagant tales of Bagdad; burglaries and murders are but pastime to this knight of the noiseless machine.

Fortunately for the reader, a commonplace plot dwelt upon with a rather unhealthy interest is somewhat relieved by several breathless chases, that are really well described; the excitement of the last race culminating in the melodramatic ending of motor and motorist in the quicksands of Essex. M. J. GILL.

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Art Thou the Mant HE scene of this tale is laid in Denver, in the heart of the tenderloin. Three women have been strangled. No one has paid the penalty of either crime. In each case, a man who has attained reputation as a criminal. lawyer has won a favorable verdict from the jury. Of great personal magnetism, austere, distant, but withal a most affectionate brother to the sister whom he *THE BLACK MOTOR CAR. By Harris Burland. Dillingham & Co.

ART THOU THE MAN? By Buy Berton. Dodd, Mead & Co.

adores, he is little understood and stands apart.

His charge to the jury during the trial of one of the suspects is florid in its melodramatic method of describing the probable way in which the crime was committed and the feelings of the murderer at the time. This strained dramatic strength is the only kind of strength that the book possesses. Yet so subtly is the mystery continued throughout the story, meshed about as it is with colorful descriptions of the gambling palaces, and the abode of those who seek shelter from the far-reaching arm of the law, that one nears the close before one learns the criminal. It is a work of the most engrossing interest. B. J. ROTART.

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The Belted Seas* HE story of Captain Tom Buckingham and his voyages to Porto del Rey and other places, but mostly other places, will prove an invaluable aid. in the treatment of melancholia; it will prove as stimulating to the mental palate after the long series of hypothetical and serious stories with which we have been deluged as a glass of mead after a dusty walk. Captain Tom is irrepressible, and his companions are more so; his friend Sadler especially. Sadler indulges in thoughts which might be called poetry, according to one's idea of what may be considered as constituting the poetic. Sailors. as a class seem to be noted for their unrivaled imagination, but Captain Tom has them all outclassed-and we cannot help asking the author the same question that Sadler asks in his "Prayer"