tucky, and by a well-known Kentucky author, is Crittendon (Scribners), by Mr. John Fox, Jr. Mr. Fox takes us into the inner and luxurious mysteries of the Blue-grass region, and introduces us to the life there in 1898. He raises a Kentucky legion and takes it to Cuba to help at San Juan and Caney, along with Lawton and Chaffee, and Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. All of these scenes and all of these subjects Mr. Fox knows thoroughly and freshly; and his facile pen makes the most of them, and contrives to weave a pretty love-story into the whole.

ation which is being bestowed on this excellent picture of our New York grandfather's life makes the book worthy of a further note. Mr. Bacheller's shrewd, sturdy New Yorkers of the North Woods farm have quite captured the American public; nor is the "local color" in the homespun phases of "Eben Holden" alone praiseworthy. The chapters that deal with the city experiences of the hero, and, indeed, the book as a whole, are true to the ear, and hold the attention to the end. It is nothing short of wonderful that a man of Mr. Bacheller's distracting and continuous business preoccupations should have produced such an excellent piece of fiction. As he himself says, "Chapters begun in the publicity of a Pullman car have been finished in the cheerless solitude of a hotel chamber. Some have had their beginning in

MR. HAMLIN GARLAND.

(Author of "The Eagle's Heart")

a sleepless night, and their end in a day of bronchitis." The region which Mr. Charles Frederic Goss, a new writer, exploits in The Redemption of David Corson (Bowen-Merrill Co.) is to the west of Kentucky, but not far away nor essentially different. This boldly conceived tale which has already proved so popular has its scene laid in the middle of the nineteenth century and in the western part of Ohio. The Indians had already been disposed of, and the most tragic work of subduing the wilderness had been accomplished, when David Corson's

story begins. But there was enough elemental nature around his home to make a wild and poetic setting for Mr. Goss' fiction. David Corson is a Quaker preacher, who, according to the admiring tributes of his neighbors, could at twenty "talk a mule into a trottin' hoss in less'n three minutes." The lucky young Quaker with such facility of language found it less difficult to talk a gypsy girl into loving him. As she already had a husband of fierce aspect and physical attainments, all the elements of an excit

ing story are furnished in the first few chapters.

Mr. Hamlin Garland has rarely produced a set of verses or work of fiction in which his worship of the great Western country, its picturesque crudities, and its elemental strength did not furnish the foundation. He does not depart from his idols in The Eagle's Heart (Appletons). The hero who turns his face to the West is Harold Excell, a proverbial minister's son, high-tempered and adventurous. He fails to dominate the Chicago cattle markets, and removes to the far West as a government agent in the Indian country. He is in the troubles between the sheepmen and cattlemen, and passes through many tremendous adventures on the mesa. The vivid descriptions of cattle-ranching and other picturesque phases of Western life are such as only one who loves his subject and who has studied it can give.

MR. CHARLES FREDERIC GOSS. (Author of "The Redemption of David Corson.")

It is a far cry from Mr. Hamlin Garland's cowpunchers and Western desperadoes to the quiet New England home folks of Mr. Charles Felton Pidgin's Quincy Adams Sawyer (C. M. Clark Pub. Co.). The hero, and the other Mason's Corner folks, dwell in a quiet Massachusetts village, and the story celebrates the virtues and failings of the tradesmen, merchants, lawyers, and politicians according to the New England standard. The story is a considerable one in length, and gives as a whole a most perfect and comprehensive picture of New England life, both as to externals and as to intellectual manners and standards.

Mr. Elmore Elliott Peake's The Darlingtons (McClure, Phillips & Co.) is not so consciously occupied in portraying the external life of the community as the foregoing; and yet it does sum up the manners and customs and ways of thinking of a new and very little known part of the United States, and is not weakened in this way by excursions into the outer world. The Darlingtons live in northern central North Carolina, in a region which is rather void of material or intellectual interests, save for the railroads and the furniture factories and other evidences of enterprise which these railroads have lately brought into existence. The Darlingtons naturally are a railroad family, and Mr. Peake carries them through such a series of railroad adven

tures as to show that Mr. Kipling and Cy Warman and other exploiters of the locomotive have not by any means used up all the literary material of that new literary field.

The Rev. William E. Barton, whose Hero in Homespun won such a well-deserved success, appears with a second novel, Pine Knot (Appletons), which successfully meets the critical scrutiny naturally accorded a volume succeeding a first success. Mr. Barton gives a virile account of the Kentucky mountain-folk in the region bordering on Tennessee, as different from the Kentuckians of John Fox's stamping-grounds as the Chinaman of Mott Street is different from the Knickerbocker aristocrat of Washington Square. His story precedes and ends with the War of Secession, and his account of the Abolitionist element among the poorer mountaineers is especially readable and valuable. Altogether, the book is one of the strongest and best of the year among those works of fiction aiming especially to reflect local color.

Mr. Hervey White's Quicksand (Small, Maynard & Co.) takes us far to the North, into the thrifty, hardworking regions of New Hampshire. The life of the sturdy farmers, their struggle with the long winter, with the exigencies of "schooling" their numerous families, their churchgoing, their literary societies, and their jollifications, are pleasant and conscientiously recorded.

Miss Jane de Forest Shelton's book, The Salt-Box House (Baker & Taylor), is even more directly and exclusively occupied in recording the eighteenth-century life in a New England hill-town. The scene is laid in Stratford, Conn., and the author has carefully collected a great number of the less-known phases and odd customs of rural life in that period, the description of which she has found most convenient to put into narrative form.

Still another State gives the scene of Mr. Nelson Lloyd's The Chronic Loafer (J. F. Taylor & Co.). The story is told in the dialect of central Pennsylvania, and includes many excellent sketches of rustic life and manners in this picturesque valley surrounded by the heights of the Blue Ridge. "The Spelling Bee," "The Wrestling Match," "The Haunted Store," "Hirum Gam, the Fiddler," "Breaking the Ice," and other chapter titles suggest the quaint subjects that Mr. Lloyd's patriarch dilates upon.

It is to the "Land of the Sky," in the heights of the Allegheny Mountains, that Mary Nelson Carter turns for her North Carolina Sketches (McClurg). The book consists of a series of sketches made up from conversations with the poor mountain-folk of this region (Charles Egbert Craddock's country), and furnish a very good picture of their meager life and curious speech. It is much the same sort of folk that Mr. Will N. Harben describes in his Northern Georgia Sketches (McClurg), though his accounts of them are given in truer story form.

STORIES OF LONDON AND NEW YORK LIFE. Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor's The Idle Born (Stone) has for its subtitle "A Comedy of Manners." The tale won the prize of a New York magazine offered for the best novel dealing with contemporary society, using the word in its limited sense. The scene is laid entirely within the sacred portals of New York's "Four Hundred," and Mr. Chatfield-Taylor's purpose is primarily to satirize the weaknesses and follies of the so-called

"smart set." Mr. Chatfield-Taylor thinks that the days of Isaac Watts, when the idle-born had the fad of writing verses which were creditable and letters which were readable, have been succeeded by days when metropolitan society has the sole ambition of leading in extravagance. This quickly reduces all social excellence to a question of money, and gives the author abundant opportunities for satire.

Miss Grace Marguerite Hurd has written a very lively and vivacious story in The Bennett Twins (Macmillan). These two young people, Donald and Agnes Bennett, leave their home in Maine in their seventeenth year, and come to New York to make their fortunes, one of them as an art student, and the other as a student of music. Their life and struggles in the metropolis are humorously told, in a way which leaves a very good picture in the reader's mind of the experiences through which such provincial neophytes must pass in the struggle for existence in a great city.

Miss Amelia E. Barr's latest story, The Maid of Maiden Lane (Dodd, Mead & Co.), too, has New York as its scene and essential atmosphere; but it is the New York of a hundred years ago, when Maiden Lane boasted handsome residences instead of rows of jewelry stores. The thousands of readers who have enjoyed Mrs. Barr's A Bow of Orange Ribbon will find in this new volume from her prolific but very even pen a further treat.

Margaret Blake Robinson's Souls in Pawn (Revell), "A Story of New York Life," is essentially of modern metropolitan conditions. It is of the New York of the missions of the Salvation Army's field that she writes with much kindly humor and philosophy. Her heroine, Miss Irving, sounds much as if she had been modeled on Mrs. Ballington Booth, and Katie Finnegan and the other neighbors of Chinatown are convincingly presented.

Another novel of New York life, Sister Carrie (Doubleday, Page & Co.), by Theodore Dreiser, brings us into an atmosphere of Rector's and the theaters rather than Chinatown and the missions. Mr. Dreiser's heroine, Caroline Meeber, comes from her country home in Wisconsin through Chicago to New York. Carrie's career in New York City, first as a struggling aspirant for histrionic honors, and finally as a famous actress, furnishes the plot of the story.

Mr. W. Pett Ridge's new book is entitled A Breaker of Laws (Macmillan). The hero is a London cockney burglar, who has an honest love for a decent young servant-girl, marries her, reforms, and turns to irreproachable work. There is a characteristic touch of cleverness in Mr. Pett Ridge's management of Alfred Bateson's relapse. He does not make him go to stealing again for the sake of saving his wife from starvation, or from evil associations, but simply because of love for his burglarious art. It appeals so strongly to Alfred's imagination to effect a clever stroke of roguery that he leaves his wife and child, whom he loves, and pilfers to his heart's content, until he is put in prison, and finally goes to South America a ruined man. The manners and the opportunities of the typical London burglar are vivaciously presented.

Miss Una L. Silberrad's story of life in the poorer quarters of London, The Lady of Dreams (Doubleday, Page & Co.), is the second book from her pen, and bids fair, taken with her first novel, The Enchanter, to make her a reputation of high order. Her heroine in The Lady of Dreams is the niece of a dissipated man, whom she cared for with a devotion that absorbs all

her outer energies, but which only helps to develop a dreamy, poetic, and altogether charming personality. When the besotted man attempts to kill her, a crisis comes, leading to a great love to compensate for her dreary existence. There is a quality of restraint and quiet power in Miss Silberrad's work which promises well for her future.

In much lighter vein is Mr. H. G. Wells' tale of London folk, Love and Mr. Lewisham (Stokes), in which the conditions of modern student life in the English metropolis are vivaciously and happily described. Lewisham, a tutor in a provincial school, goes up to the metropolis, falls in love with a young girl, the daughter of a precious rascal, and marries her. Ethel's father poses as a Spiritualist, and his frauds, and Mr. Wells' exposition of their methods, form an entertaining part of the story.

Mr. Percy White takes us to quite a different and most highly respectable kind of London in his story, The West End (Harpers). He cleverly portrays the weaknesses and foibles of the London "smart set," and the career of John Treadaway, an otherwise respectable and estimable manufacturer of jam, who enters the edifice of society through a side-door.

TALES OF STRANGE LANDS.

Mr. E. P. Dole has hit upon a fascinating legend of an ancient goddess-queen of Hawaii as the basis of his story, Hiwa (Harpers). The heroine, one of the ancient race of island demi-gods, has violated a sacred law, and tries to save her life and that of her unborn child, which are forfeit to the terrible Ku. The story of her escape, and the growth of her son into manly beauty and strength, and the leadership of his people, is well worth the telling; and this little volume, in its tasteful binding, is altogether

a welcome addition to the season's work in fiction.

Very like Mr. Dole's story, in its general setting, is Kelea, the Surf-Rider (Ford, Howard & Hulbert), by Mr. Alexander Stevenson Twombly, a romance of pagan Hawaii. Mr. Twombly knows his Hawaii thoroughly, and the poetic story, as well as his interesting use of the traditions and folk-lore of the islandMLLE. DE LA RAMÉE ("OUIDA") ers, makes Kelea a volume of interest from several points of view. Iroka: Tales of Japan (Doubleday & McClure Co.), comes from a Japanese author, Mr. Adachi Kinnosuké, who has written in English this series of sketches portraying the life and folk-lore of the haughty Samurai class. Mr. Kinnosuké is a Japanese residing in California, and several of these stories have been published in American periodicals. That the Japanese taste for delicate and quaint imagery has not been lost in this author's transition to the English language, is shown particularly in such descriptions as that of the cherryblossoms: "A bit of gauze torn off from the skirt of

that vain coquette called Spring, in her all-too-hasty and careless way of passing over this earth."

The perennially brilliant Ouida appears in a new book, as good as anything she has ever written out of all her vast output, and almost entirely free from the qualities which have cheapened the public for many of her earlier stories. The Waters of Edera (Fenno) is a story of Italy, based on the devotion of the peasant to his native soil. Ouida's always trenchant, if sometimes mistaken, pen has an easy task in the thorough demolishing of the supposition of an actual Italian unity. She paints the Italian people as ground under an absurd and cruel government. The passages in this book, which show the love of the peasant hero for his birthplace, and its rivers and trees and hills, are such as no other woman writer could produce. Whatever one may have to think of Mlle. De La Ramée's quarrel with civilization, one will want to read this excellent story.

Mrs. Flora Annie Steel's novels have always been Indian scenes; but in her last book, The Hosts of the Lord (Macmillan), we have a more modern setting than in the others. The story produces an excellent picture of English India, and shows interesting points of contact between the Eurasians and the native life.

Mr. Henry B. Fuller, in The Last Refuge (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), returns to the quaint discursive style of his Chevalier of Pensieri Vani. The Last Refuge is a Sicilian romance, telling of the search of a group of people, the characters of the book, for a life of more beauty; and of their hegira to Sicily, which land is to produce the scene of a sort of Golden Age, so far as the inner life is concerned. Everything that Mr. Fuller writes is distinguished by a rare delicacy of fancy and expression; and The Last Refuge is no exception to this rule.

St. Peter's Umbrella (Harpers) is a series of sketches of Magyar life, by Kálmán Mikszáth, who is introduced to us as second only to Maurus Jokai in popularity among his countrymen. The pictures of Slavic life in this volume are enlivened by a quaint humor which bring the peculiarities and characteristics of the Hungarian peasant into pleasant relief.

It is the Bohemian village folk that Madame Flora B. Kopta utilizes in her novel The Forestman of Vimpek (Lothrop). Her studies of life and character in far-away communities buried in the forests of Bohemia, her interpretation of the passions, the joys and griefs of the village peasantry, have a decidedly original and grateful flavor.

The Weird Orient (Henry T. Coates & Co.) is the title of a writer hitherto unknown to Americans. Rabbi Henry Iliowizi is a Hebrew who grew up in Russia and Roumania, was educated in Germany, and has become an important educating influence among the people of his race. He has written a volume of stories of Russian life, and now publishes in America this series of Eastern tales of a legendary cast, which leave a vivid impression of the poetic imagination of the Moors among whom the author collected the material for his work.

There is a haunting flavor in several of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne's stories, collected under the title The Queen Versus Billy (Scribners), which reminds us of his stepfather, Robert Louis Stevenson. The scenes of the stories are chiefly laid in the Samoan Islands, which have been Mr. Osbourne's home since Stevenson led the family thither in search of health. The scoundrelly white men,-not bad, but just scoundrels, and the

stupid but affectionate natives of those lazy islands, and the languorous freedom from the conventions of civilized life, are most cleverly used in Mr. Osbourne's literary workmanship. Why "The Beautiful Man of Pingalap" should be such a good story to read might puzzle a critical analyst to decide; and yet it is, beyond a peradventure.

In Elissa (Longmans), Mr. Rider Haggard takes us, of course, to Africa: but this time to Phoenicia, the city in South Central Africa whose mysterious ruins have furnished much speculative food for historians and archæologists. Here was a great trading town, with vast fortifications. Mr. Rider Haggard attempts to show, in the incidents of his story, how such an incomprehensible thing might have existed, and how the town came to extinction.

Sigurd Eckdal's Bride (Little, Brown & Co.), by Richard Voss, is a story of Scandinavian life among the great snowdrifts and icy atmosphere of the Norwegian solitudes. The scheme of the tale is the arctic expedition of the hero and his friends in search of the north pole.

NOVELS WITH VARIOUS MOTIVES.

Mr. Eden Phillpotts follows his Children of the Mist, which was so well received on account of its virile imaginative qualities, with Sons of the Morning (Putnams), -a love-story, with the scene laid in Devonshire. Mr. Phillpotts has been bold enough to make his heroine be in love with two men at the same time. After having put her in this most dangerous predicament, he is kind enough to allow her to marry both of them in turn. The significant qualities of Mr. Phillpotts' work point, in many ways, to a similarity to Mr. Thomas Hardy. The subtile imaginative study of the girl's emotions, the philosophic attitude toward the fact of sex, and in the background the delicious portrayal of the Devonshire rustics, bring Mr. Phillpotts decidedly into Mr. Hardy's field. If the younger novelist finds no such delicate and poetical setting as he of Wessex, no such artistic interpretation of the nature world surrounding his characters, -for that matter, neither does any other author to-day.

Mr. Robert Burns Wilson is known to many readers as a maker of dreamy and poetic verses. Indeed, his temperament is essentially mystical. His last volume, Until the Day Break (Scribners), is a novel which might have been expected from such a literary nature. In the prelude, a young author reads his first story to his mother. This story is the romance of the volume, and at the end the mother informs him that the author has simpy told a piece of family history which has not been revealed to him by human means.

A new book appears from the famous Hungarian author, Maurus Jokai, Dr. Dumany's Wife (Doubleday & McClure Co.), translated by F. Steinitz. The scene is laid during the Franco-Prussian War, and offers Dr. Jokai the highly dramatic opportunities which his genius is prone to select. The story deals with a marriage made under a misapprehension, which is not dispelled until years after.

The always clever and vivacious John Oliver Hobbes (Mrs. Craigie) has written, in Robert Orange (Stokes), a sequel to The School for Saints. She deals wittily with the religious, political, and philosophical questions broached in the story, which has for its characters a dilettante politician as a hero, a painter, a conventional peer of England, an ambassador, a political adven

turer, and Lord Disraeli, whose figure has a great attraction for Mrs. Craigie.

Mr. Harrison Robertson begins his story, Red Blood and Blue (Scribners), with a Kentucky shooting scene and its surroundings. The narrative is of a low-born youth with large aspirations, and it takes us, as Mr. John Fox's story does, from Kentucky to San Juan Hill and back.

In Mr. Anthony Hope's new novel, Quisanté (Stokes), he leaves his half or wholly fanciful characters and moves among Englishmen of to-day and of the earth, their political affairs and business enterprises. Mr. Hope has evidently determined, in this work, to sacrifice the light improvisation and piquancy of his earlier works to the demands of a more substantial and solid and more "regular" novel.

SOME COLLECTIONS OF SHORT STORIES. The collection of Mr. Joel Chandler Harris' newest short stories, On the Wing of Occasions (Doubleday, Page & Co.), includes a novelette of about 30,000 words, called "The Kidnaping of President Lincoln," which is itself sufficiently striking to give special significance to this volume. No biography of the great War President has afforded a more lifelike picture of his giant figure, or a more vivid impression of his ready, homely wit and large simplicity. Four other stories are in the volume: "Why the Confederacy Failed," "In the Order of Providence," "The Troubles of Martin Coy," and "The Whims of Captain McCarthy." Another reason to give this volume some special interest is the announcement that Mr. Joel Chandler Harris has this autumn retired from newspaper work, in order to give his whole time to story-making. The immortal "Uncle Remus" stories, and Mr. Harris' other notable productions, were written by him through the past years while

he was engaged in the most grinding work on the Atlanta Constitution.

Mr. Eden Phillpotts will enlist the sympathy of the reader with his title, The Human Boy (Harpers). The eleven stories which make up the little volume deal with boy life and characters in a style not unlike that of Tom Brown at Rugby. Mr. Phillpotts' characters are real boys--a quality so rare in boy stories that nothing more need be said to recommend his book.

The late Mr. Stephen Crane's posthumous volume is named Wounds in the Rain (Stokes). It consists of various war-stories descriptive of the campaign against the Spaniards in Cuba in 1898. Let the London Academy say what it will, these stories are capital work, and give a real and vivid impression in a new and striking way, whether it be of the heroism of Nolan, the Government regular, or of the brisk action of the "Holy Moses" and the "Chicken" with a Spanish warship. There are eleven of Mr. Crane's last-written short stories in the volume, most of which have been published before in American magazines.

Mr. A. T. Quiller - Couch names his new book Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts (Scribners), and of the fifteen stories which make up the volume, most of them have to do with the sea; for Mr. Quiller-Couch's pen is apt to travel seaward, and he is at his best when the tang of Margate inspires him. They are a capital lot of tales. "Once Aboard the Lugger," which tells of the kidnaping of the unwilling Rev. Samuel Bax by the salty Nance, who is sick of love for him, is especially delicious.

derful distinction in style, the subtile analysis and perfect method which in any detached portion of any one of them would at once proclaim him the author. No matter who quarrels with Mr. James for an excess of attention to the form at the expense of the matter of his stories, there can never be a lack of the readers he would wish to reach for such exquisite delineations as "Paste" and "Maud-Evelyn."

Mr. Egerton Castle, who has become widely known as the author of The Pride of Jennico, gives a number of short stories under the title Marshfield the Observer (Stone). Mr. Castle has only recently become celebrated as a writer; but before that he was already celebrated as one of the first fencers of the world, and as an authority on the history of swordsmanship. One of the stories in this collection utilizes his acquaintance with sword-play in a most vigorous description of a fight with the blades. Most of the tales are of a bizarre and weird cast.

Mr. Cy Warman is known as the literary prophet of

a score of sketches inspired by the life of the railroad track, in which Mr. Warman's ready humor, keen observation, and thorough knowledge of his subjectmatter show to good advantage.

Mr. S. Ꭱ . Crockett's new book is called The Stickit Minister's Wooing (Doubleday, Page & Co.). The thousands of readers of The Stickit Minister, which was published

seven

years ago, and first won Mr. Crockett notice

(Mr. Parker, whose new book of FrenchCanadian tales is noticed here, has just been elected a member of the British Parliament for Gravesend.)

in the literary world will understand what to expect in the way of homely humor and pathos in the present volume. Apropos of the capacity Mr. Crockett shows for turning out readable stories with commendable regularity, it is interesting to hear his publishers say he is at his desk at five o'clock in the morning, and that he never misses a sunrise. However, he drops all literary work after nine. Mr. Crockett is "a broadshouldered giant of six feet four. To him book-making is rather a diversion than a serious task."

Mr. Robert Shackleton's stories in Toomey and Others (Scribners) are of East-Side life in New York City. The author has a keen ear for both the humor and the pathos of the "Avenue A" community. The opening story, "How Toomey Willed His Government Job," is especially good.

Mr. Gilbert Parker, in dedicating his new volume of short stories, The Lane That Had No Turning (Doubleday, Page & Co.), to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, pays a tribute to that quaint corner of America, French Canada, which has given this highly successful novelist the great part of his material. "A land without poverty and yet without riches, French Canada stands alone, too well educated to have a peasantry, too poor to have an aristocracy. . . . I have never seen frugality and industry associated with so much domestic virtue, so much education and intelligence, and so deep and simple a religious life." Mr. Parker announces, too, that this volume marks the end of his narrations of French-Canadian life. The stories show that effective appreciation of the simple, shrewd folk who have been the characters in Pierre and His People, and rise at times to great pathos. It is to be hoped that Mr. Parker's new duties as a British legislator will not entirely deprive us of so good a story-teller.