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A young clerk in an insurance office, who wanted to go as a missionary to India, is the hero, if there is one, of Mrs. ALICE PERRIN’S latest novel, The Vow of Silence (CASSELL).  I have never read a book about India which made such an ambition seem more courageous, for it gives such a hot and thirsty picture of that country when Harold Williams at last reaches it that it is positively uncomfortable to read it in Summer weather. Harold and his brother and sister missionaries live in a state of stuffy discomfort which soon undermines his health and leaves him no defence against the charms of Elaine Taverner, who has a large cool drawing-room and dainty frocks, and a young soldier lover and an old scholar husband, and all the other things we expect of pretty young women in Anglo-Indian novels.  Poor Harold, consumed at once by a zeal which makes him long to save Elaine’s soul and a passion which makes him embrace a parcel of her lingerie, very naturally loses the remains of his reason and paves the way for her marriage with her lover by obligingly pushing the elderly husband into the jaws of a crocodile.  If it were more convincing it would be a painful story—­in some hands it might have been a great one; as it is, Mrs. PERRIN seems for once to have missed her opportunity.

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If the publisher of About It And About had told me on the wrapper that Mr. D. WILLOUGHBY has an excellent fund of literary reminiscence, on which he draws for the modelling of a very pretty epigrammatical style, I should, after reading the book, have agreed with him heartily.  What Mr. T. FISHER UNWIN does say about these short essays, which embrace most of the subjects on which people have violent opinions, is that the author’s “point of view is that of the natural historian making an unprejudiced examination.”  An unprejudiced man, I take it, is a man whose sentiments are the same as mine, and I happen to disagree with Mr. WILLOUGHBY as profoundly as possible on several of the themes he has chosen.  On fox-hunting, for instance, which he considers a more decadent sport than bull-fighting; and on Ulster, which he attacks bitterly by comparison with the rest of Ireland, for cherishing antiquated political animosities and talking about the Battle of the Boyne.  But will Mr. WILLOUGHBY not have been hearing of “the curse of CROMWELL”?  Let us rather agree to be impatient with Yorkshire for her absurd tranquillity with regard to WILLIAM THE FIRST. I repeat that Mr. WILLOUGHBY has a very clever style, but, bless his heart, he is as bigoted as I am myself.

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[Illustration:  Occupant of Pew. “ENTIRELY SELF-MADE.  ORIGINALLY A WAITER, AS YOU CAN SEE.”]