courteous; Sherman is voluble; Grant is taciturn; Cluyme is shifty-and so it goes on. Each has his temperamental tag like the caricatures of Dickens, whose "Mr. Carker is all teeth, his Rosa Dartle all scar."

Again, one may question the literary craftsmanship which produces characters that run to early felicitous descriptive words, as if they were all embryo novelists. Moreover, an author who inserts boomerang, self-laudatory praises, and loftily tells what other-presumably less fortunate-authors would do under the circumstances, is bound to lose sympathy. We suspect there is much truth in Mr. Churchill's own remark: "The trouble with many narratives is that they tell too much." Had he taken this to heart and pruned The Crisis down to one-third its present size, we should have been the gainers. In the matter of scenes there is no occasion for so much variety. The bewildering rapidity with which they shift tends to throw the plot into confusion and the effect of confusion is heightened by the numerous changes in the point of view from which the story is told. Yet The Crisis is entertaining; and this, added to the fact that it is, in a manner, a sequel to Richard Carvel, and that it introduces Civil War heroes, has served to bring it into surprising prominence.

H. R. Van L.

"THE WAYS OF THE SERVICE." By Frederick Palmer. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

The Ways of the Service, a collection of army and navy stories by Mr. Frederick Palmer, is the first literary result of our occupation of the Philippines, and is quite as interesting for the supplementary light it throws on conditions in the islands as it is for its pictures of life in the service. The book at once suggests reminiscences of the work of Mr. Kipling and Mr. Davis, and indeed anyone writing of army life or the life of Anglo-Saxons in the tropics can hardly escape their influence. It is interesting to note the resemblances and contrasts between the service types of India and those in the Philippines. Mr. Kipling's view of army life is smarter and more cynical

than Mr. Palmer's, but the pictures of both show the same prevailing meagerness of life in barracks, the same sharply isolated point of view, and the same devotion to the service as a thing apart which makes it so admirable and effective. We are surprised at first to find our old friend, Mrs. Gadsby, come to life again as Mrs. Gerlison, but she fits so well in her new situation and has developed so many new qualities that she seems quite as natural and inevitable as her prototype. One concludes that the Anglo-Saxon army is a thing pretty much the same everywhere. In a different way the affinity of these stories with those of Mr. Davis is equally close. Mr. Davis has described so often the life of white men in the tropics and the treachery and inferiority of the half-breed that when anyone else enters the field we instinctively seek resemblances. They are not hard to find in these stories of Mr. Palmer's. In the very first one, Ballard, he has a hero and a situation which seem to have popped out of Mr. Davis's pages, and besides he has given us, rather melodramatically but with picturesque effect, an idea of the ineffable something which separates the white man from the mestizo. But aside from these considerations, the stories, though loosely constructed and without the pretense of conscious art, are good reading. They employ sometimes wonderful expedients as aid in hard places, and they are not free from all traces of journalism. However, they give a vivid and entertaining account of army and navy life, and present a picture which one would imagine a man in the service would not object to.

H. L. W.

"THE WESTERNERS." By Stewart Edward White. New York: McClure, Phillips and Company.

The Westerners is a strange mixture of half-worked-out psychical formulæ with a mining camp in the Black Hills for a background. By a hundred phrases the author betrays himself as an Eastern college man, and why he should attempt to write a story of the lives and sufferings of the men of the West, whom at best he has merely glanced at casually, is not evident.

His first words are of the impression of a comfortable tourist peering at a Western town from a Pullman palace car, and his own impressions appear to have been about as correct.

The story deals with the slow awakening of the conscience of a New England girl who was raised at an Indian reservation agency in Dakotah as the daughter of a half-breed French-Indian. The half-breed goes West, and conceiving a grudge against the girl's mother, murders her and determines to raise the girl to get his full revenge by ruining her. He also tries to avenge himself on a successful miner at the raw mining camp by destroying his status as a business man. In both his villainous schemes the half-breed fails, for the girl's conscience awakes in time to save her from too great intimacy with a low fellow, and the miner by a streak of luck regains his for

tunes.

Frequently for whole chapters we lose sight of the girl and the villain half-breed, while the author attempts to initiate us into the mysteries of mines and shafts, information which is patent to any casual visitor at a new mining camp. The story ends with the saving of the girl by marrying an Eastern college man who has turned miner and who first stirs up in her some idea of conscience. The villain is put to death by a tribe of Indians with whom he has allied himself and whom he has wronged.

Molly Lafond, the heroine, is innocent and lovable, and she enlists our sympathy from the start, as she tries to make out her true path of right and duty among the rocks and crags of the Western life, guided only by the promptings of her better self.

Michail Lafond himself is rather too great an exaggeration, being transported from the woods of Canada with a great store of wood craft, only to become a scout and successful plainsman, while in reality a shrewd plains Indian must have first seen the sun over the wide prairie and have grown up hand in hand with the secrets and dangers of a plains life. His lust for revenge is the only Indian trait Lafond has, while his slow method of carrying it out is neither Indian nor Canadian. The other characters are the popular ideals of the West, the Colt's pistol, high boots type that belonged to the pe

riod of the story, the time of the massacre of Custer, some few years before the affair of Sitting Bull at Wounded Knee. None of them rise above the commonplace, and are neither noteworthy nor disappointing.

As a whole the book suffers from the introduction of details which a true born Westerner would bring in unconsciously, details which lead us too far astray from the author's evident purpose of working out the slow awakening of a hereditary conscience, and the attempted realization of revenge in a half-Latin, half-Indian Westerner.

Books Received.

"THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS." By George Douglas. New York: McClure, Phillips and Company.

"FRESHMAN ENGLISH AND THEME-CORRECTING IN HARVARD COLLEGE." By C. T. Copeland and H. M. Rideout. New York, Boston, and Chicago: Silver, Burdett and Company.

"JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL." A Biography. By Horace Elisha Scudder. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.