that the slightest experience of fiction should have warned her to be invariably curative.  Perhaps the best of the tales is “Jane,” which tells very amusingly the results of a hospital strike that in actual life would, I imagine, have provided little humorous relief.  By this time you may have gathered that what matters about Mrs. RINEHART is not what she says but the way that she says it; upon which hint you can act as fancy dictates.

* * * * *

I very distinctly feel that “KATHARINE TYNAN” could have made a first-rate novel of Denys the Dreamer (COLLINS) and have had plenty over for a good second if she had taken the trouble.  But her fluent pen runs away with her down paths that lead nowhere in particular, instead of developing her main characters and situations to an intelligible and satisfactory point. Denys is of a gentle Irish family that has come down to very small farming.  He dreams good, solid and rather Anglo-Saxon dreams of draining bogs on the sea-coast estates of Lord Leenane, whose agent he becomes (and whose daughter he loves from afar), and of a great port that is to rival Belfast.  Unexpected, not to say incredible, assistance comes from a Jew money-lender and his wife.  The portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Aarons are the best things in the book, and I hope Mrs. HINKSON will make a novel about these two admirable people some day soon. Denys makes his own and his patron’s fortune and I am sure lives happily ever after with Dawn, who is the palest wraith of a girl, owing to the shameful neglect of her author, who is too busy putting large sums of money into the pockets of the principal puppets.  Indeed, for a West Coast of Ireland story a demoralising amount of money is going about.

* * * * *

The principal scenes of The North Door (CONSTABLE) are laid in the Cornwall of some hundred-and-thirty years ago, and I welcome Dr. GREVILLE MACDONALD as an expert in the Cornish language and character.  Cornwall, as all readers of fiction know, has during the last few years been attacked again and again by novelists, and most of them would do well to study Dr. MACDONALD’S romance and most thoroughly to digest it.  In form, however, he will have little to teach them, for his book is very indifferently constructed.  It may seem ungrateful in these rather skimpy days to complain of a surfeit of matter, but there is stuff in this book for two if not three novels.  One cannot blame Dr. MACDONALD for his indignation at the miseries of child-labour, but here it is perhaps out of place.  His Mr. Trevenna, the mystical parson, friend of smugglers and of everyone who suffered from laws (unrighteous or righteous), is a great figure; and I shall not soon forget either his correspondence with Lady Evangeline Walrond or his superhuman kindliness of heart.  If you want to get at the true flavour of Cornwall you have only to open The North Door.