From the cover of _A Tail of Gold_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) I gather with respectful interest that its author, Mr. DAVID HENNESSEY, recently won four hundred pounds with another story in open competition. I did not read the story in question, but in view of its satisfactory financial result I may be permitted to express a hope that it was considerably better work than the present volume. Let me be entirely fair. _A Tail of Gold_ has some pictures of Australian mining life that are not without interest; but I am bound to add that a careful and sympathetic perusal has failed to disclose any other reason for its existence. The plot, so far as there is one, concerns the chequered career of a certain _Major Smart_, who seems to have been by no means all that a major should be. Amongst other unpleasing peculiarities, he was apparently possessed of a fetish that brought misfortune or death to all who were associated with him. These results were in the main involuntary; but it is only just to add that _Smart_ was not above assisting nature to take her course. Thus, some years before the opening of the story, he had deliberately buried one poor lady alive in a cave containing sulphide of mercury. Never ask me why. I am as muddled by this as I am over his further conduct in leaving with the corpse every possible clue in the way of letters and ciphers that could bring his guilt home to him. In any ordinary novel he would have been convicted in a few chapters; but _A Tail of Gold_ wags (if I may use the term) so leisurely, and its action is so much impeded by false starts and repetitions and general haphazardness, that there is no telling how long it might not have continued but for the limitations of volume form. No, I can't pretend I liked it much.
Madame ALBANESI, in _The Cap of Youth_ (HUTCHINSON), cannot be accused of excessive kindness to her own sex, for the charming women of the book are almost snuffed out by two poisonous females, _Lady Bollington_ and _Lady Catherine Chiltern_. Indeed these ladies are a little too much of a bad thing, and, not for the first time, I am left thinking how wonderfully Madame ALBANESI'S novels might be improved if she could persuade herself to bestow an occasional virtue upon her wicked characters. The heroine, _Virginia_, escaped from the hands of one of the pair only to fall under the thumb of the other. I must admit, however, that _Lady Catherine_ had some reason to be angry at having _Virginia_ suddenly dumped upon her as a derelict daughter-in-law. Why _Brian Chiltern_ married in haste and then left his wife to endure such impossible conditions you must find out for yourself, but I fancy you will agree that his delicacy of feeling amounted to sheer stupidity. Nevertheless this story is bound to be popular, and I should have had no complaint to make if I did not feel that its author has it in her to do better work.