If this is so America was hardly worth discovering.
Illustration: _Long-suffering Vegetarian Lodger._ "DON'T TROUBLE TO COOK THE CATERPILLARS IN FUTURE, MR. GEDGE. I _NEVER_ EAT THEM."
(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)
The dry sticks, as it were, of _The Bale Fire_ (HUTCHINSON) are not very cunningly laid, with the result that from a spectacular point of view the conflagration fizzles out rather tamely. But there are so many bright passages in the book and so many sympathetic sketches of characters that I cannot help wishing the FRASERS (HUGH and MRS.) had either written a longer story depending completely on the interplay of temperament, or else built more carefully on their melodramatic substructure. For though _Captain Mayhune_, the villain of the piece, is the proprietor of a gaming-hell and terrorises _Lady Trague_ with a piece of blotting-paper on which may be read a portion of her letter to a young man whom she indiscreetly though innocently adores, nothing very serious comes of his machinations, and our interest in the book is mainly confined to the emotional relations between _Sir Charles_, a fussy elderly martinet, his too young wife, and _Maisie_, her seventeen-year-old step-daughter, who varies from deeper moods to those of a silly and self-willed child. Then there is _Captain Mayhune_ himself, a man of good impulses and evil, in whom, somehow or other, though never without a struggle, the evil always triumphs. Other characters are rather jerkily introduced, amongst whom a family of good-natured and thoroughly "nice" Americans, who help to straighten things out and bring people to a better understanding, are most conspicuous. But that piece of blotting-paper! If I were a stationer and kept a circulating library, I think I should try to turn an honest penny by selling sand to my customers along with their packets of linen-wove and blue-black writing-fluid. "Simple, effective, and leaves no chance to the blackmailer."
It is pleasant to receive in this age of realism a novel that is frankly romantic. Miss KAYE-SMITH in _Three against the World_ (CHAPMAN AND HALL) colours up life with lavish brush. We have a returned convict who fiddles in the rain for the benefit of dancing village children; we have impresarios who stand at the doors of inns and hear him thus fiddling; an untidy heroine who speaks in gasps and gurglings; and a lover who goes to literary parties in London and therefore (the inference is implied by the author) falls in love with two ladies at once. Such a novel is refreshing after the mathematical accuracy with which clerks, barmaids and politicians are perpetually presented to us by our novelists, but I am not at all sure that Miss KAYE-SMITH is wise in trusting our credulity too far. There was a day when one would have accompanied her _Tramping Methodist_ anywhere, but of late years that promise has not been fulfilled, and her last novel is, I think, distinctly her poorest. I like her affection for Sussex, her catalogue of Sussex names, the fine colour of her descriptive work; but her story is on the present occasion too obviously arranged behind the scenes. One can see the author working again and again for the romantic moment, and scenes that should have convinced and wrung the reader's heart (always eager to be wrung) have in their appearance some suspicion of the paint and paste-pot of the cheaper drama. I hope that Miss KATE-SMITH will get back in her next book to her earlier strength and sincerity.