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Any perceptive person could have foretold disaster, but there was none such at Cranbourne. Pauline, a dear, finds her salvation in the service of her hypersensitive brother, Sebastian, whose happiness has been wrecked by his parents' crass stupidity. The story opens in the eighties of last century; one did not perhaps quite appreciate that really heavy fatherhood survived to that date. Now it is our sons and daughters that tend to put on weight. Dare one, by the way, beg Miss Mordaunt to engage a really nice proof-reader with powers of attorney to deal with such exuberant malapropisms as our dear old friend "immured to," and "anchorite" for "acolyte"; and to collect stragglers in the way of unfinished sentences? Her work is too good for these little flaws.

Arabia Infelix, or the Turks in Yamen (Macmillan), is book the number of whose readers will probably be largely increased by the time and circumstance of its publication. Even to-day, when we read and talk and think so much about the Unspeakable One, I doubt if many persons could tell off-hand whether Yamen was a country or a costume. For their benefit let me hasten to pass on my own superior (if lately acquired) erudition. Yamen, then, is, roughly speaking, the left-hand strip of the Arabian peninsula, fringing the Red Sea; and this book about it has been written by Mr. G. Wyman Bury, who evidently enjoys unique knowledge of his subject. Arabia is so far removed from most of us in language and history and customs that tales of it have always the fantastic and unreal atmosphere of another world. To me it remains a land that I am well content to explore at second-hand―but this is prejudice. It is certainly picturesque; Mr. Bury's illustrative photographs (some of the best I have ever seen) are evidence of this. One of the most attractive of them is called "Return of Zaptieh to the Hukoomah at Menakah," a title (or I am much mistaken) that will mean less than nothing to the majority. For its interpretation I must refer you to the author himself. I should, by the way, explain that, though seasoned here and there with an agreeable humour, this is in no sense a volume of frivolous entertainment. Mr. BURY writes as an expert for those who want expert and practical information; the chatter and small talk of travel is not in his scheme. But at a time when we are all speculating as to the future of the Turk this record of a what he has done and left undone in a little known land has a peculiar interest and value.

The Dark Tower (Secker) is an unusual and, in many ways, a remarkable work. Mr. F. Brett Young has already given evidence of being a writer a long way removed From the ordinary ruck of novelists; this book will confirm his reputation. At first, perhaps, the skill of his attack is not altogether apparent. The opening chapters of the tale seem to hesitate uncertainly, playing as it were for position. Then, just when you may be asking yourself, "Is anything definite ever going to happen?" pounce! the thing has you by the throat, not to struggle free before the last line is read. It is a sombre story enough, this of the two brothers living in their lonely farm high up on the mountains of the Welsh border―a place that itself becomes like a character in the tragedy, so well is the brooding spirit of it realised. Charlie, the older brother, had been a pleasant wastrel till he married Judith, a slip of a Celt with red hair and green eyes; and the little money there was to begin with dwindle beneath the extortions of her poaching relatives. Then Charlie started to drink himself to death; and Alaric, who had failed as a musical journalist, returned to make his home in the tower of the farm. Thenceforward the tale is of a Welsh Pelléas and Mélisande, rushing swiftly to it inevitable doom. The vigour of it, told with an uncommon blend of realism and beauty is what I found impossible to resist. The author has wonderfully conveyed an atmosphere of rarefied passion without a hint of sentimentality. There is a distinction and austerity in his treatment of which I can only record my appreciation and leave you to enjoy them for yourself. His style you will find a dry clear wine, sparkling, with never a taste of sugar―an unpicturesque metaphor, but one that fairly expresses the appeal of this quite uncommon book to the critical taste.

Not often has it been my good fortune to find amusement in publishers' announcements, but I confess to grinning broadly when I read Messrs. Hutchinson's remarks upon The Great Age. "To attempt," they say, "to introduce Shakespeare into a novel would seem to be daring, if not courting disaster," and then go on to assure us that Mr. J. C. Snaith has succeeded where others would have failed, because he has written a romance that teems with exciting incident. I trust that my sense of humour is not perverted, but I cannot help finding something extraordinarily laughable in the commandeering of Shakespeare by Mr. Snaith, and in the publishers' apologetic justification of his audacious act. Granted, however, that the rash deed demanded some apology, I say unhesitatingly that the post could not have fallen into more reverent hands than those of Mr. Snaith. The Bard is brought in as a sort of fairy godfather to a boy and a maid who wander through the land in a frantic attempt to escape from the clutches of the law. If I had to propose a vote of sympathy with any of the characters my choice would fall not on Shakespeare but on Queen Elizabeth, for she has but few friends among modern writers, and in this small company Mr. Snaith is certainly not enrolled. The author has put to his credit a tale full of perils and hair-breadth escapes, and he has made an honest and, on the whole, successful attempt to reproduce the phraseology of the Elizabethan age; though I doubt if the word "sinister," which he works so hard, was really popular in those spacious days.

How a torn label aroused the suspicions of an alert railway porter.