attractive young lady being quite content to be whisked back in the turning of a page from destitution in Lambeth to the place she loves, without knowing or caring at all how the miracle has been wrought; while we, reader and author alike, equally in the dark, are too happy to have her home to worry about it either, preferring to wander with her through the dear old rooms and let explanations go hang.  Anyhow, perhaps one can forgive a certain amount of looseness in a story that holds such pleasant things as a family rainbow, an “osier ait” and a sailor-poet worshipping from afar.  And indeed, though far from brilliant, the book is really rather lovable.

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In The Leatherwood God (JENKINS) Mr. W.D.  HOWELLS has written a powerful and very interesting study of an unusual theme.  Religious mania, and those queer manifestations of it that hover uncertainly between fraud and hysteria, have always provided a subject of attraction for the curious.  Mr. HOWELLS sets his romance in the early days of the last century, at the backwoods settlement of Leatherwood, where the community of the faithful are perturbed by the arrival amongst them of a stranger, one Dylks, who claims divine origin and the power to work miracles.  Actually, this Dylks was about as bad a hat as any made.  He had deserted his legal wife, Nancy, and allowed her, in supposed widowhood, to marry a de facto husband whom she adored.  So you will see that the turning up again of Number One, unrecognised and surrounded by the trappings of god-head and the adoration of the Elect, creates for Nancy a very pretty and absorbing problem in social ethics.  But Mr. HOWELLS has done more than this.  Having shown Dylks as the arch-villain and impostor that he is, he proceeds to the subtler task of enlisting our sympathy for him.  It is this that gives the story its higher quality.  The horror of the poor wretch’s position, driven on by his own words, almost, in time, coming himself to a kind of belief in them, haunted always by the increasing demands of his dupes, is most powerfully portrayed.  So much so that in the end we hear of his death (by suicide or accident) with an emotion of relief and pity that is a real tribute to his creator. The Leatherwood God is not a long story, but for concentrated power it deserves to be classed amongst the outstanding work of the season.

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I should call Mrs. VICTOR RICKARD a bold plotter—­of course in a strictly literary sense.  It must at this moment have required some courage to make your hero an agent of the British Secret Service.  And having done this she certainly shirks none of the unpleasant possibilities of the situation so created.  In the interest of his profession, and for no reward save the service of his country, Marcus Janover is called upon to sacrifice love, friendship, even