great river.  GREGOROVITSH is like TOURGENIEV in his devotion to peasant and country types, but otherwise more akin to our own younger school of realists in the minuteness of his observation.  Throughout the story abounds in character-study of a kind that, while building up the figure with a thousand details, will add suddenly some vivid touch that brings the whole wonderfully and unforgettably to life.  An example of this is Akim, that perfect type of the hopeless incompetent, whose very futility, while it rightly exasperates his fellows, makes him a delight to the reader; so that his death, at the end of the first part, comes with an effect of personal loss.  For my own part, as poor Akim had never once before accomplished what he set out to do, I was quite expectant of his recovery, and proportionately disappointed.  Throughout also there are pen-pictures of Russian scenery, full of vivid colour; while the story itself, though inevitably in a somewhat minor key, is never sordid or pessimistic.  Emphatically therefore a book for everyone to read who cares to know the best in the literature of our great Ally.

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MARGARET DELAND’S well-proved pen gives us a spirited sketch of a modernist American woman in The Rising Tide (MURRAY).  I don’t quite know how this enigmatic sentence, which 1 have long puzzled over and frankly given up, came to escape both author and reader:  “Once Mrs. Childs said to tell Fred her Uncle William would say it was perfect nonsense.”  I feel sure it is not good American.  However, Freddy Payton is a young girl who tells the inconvenient truth to everybody about everything, and you may guess that such candour does not make for peace. Mrs. Payton elects to keep her idiot son in the house, and Freddy thinks an asylum is the proper place for him, and says so.  The late Mr. Payton was a rake, and Freddy derides her mother’s weeds on the ground that the widow is really in her heart waving flags for deliverance, but daren’t admit it. Freddy offers cigarettes to the curate, which is apparently a much greater crime over there than here. Freddy finally, carried along by the rising tide, asks the man she loves to marry her, mistaking his friendship for something stronger, and learns that, as the old-fashioned people like her mother realise, men are essentially hunters and “won’t bag the game if it perches on their fists.”  I wonder!  But Freddy got a better man—­the diffident elderly man who was waiting round the corner.  In fact, Freddy is rather a sport, and if Mrs. DELAND intended her as a tract for the times, in the manner of Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD, her shot has miscarried—­at least so far as I am concerned.

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[Illustration:  FORCE OF HABIT.

HOW AN ESCAPED PRISONER OF WAR BETRAYED HIMSELF.]

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