talist. It merely avoids the business man, who in the present
order of things borrows the capital, hires the laborers, and directs the
business. Practically he is a salaried man. Prof. Walker finds
difficulty in giving this man a title suitable for use in treatises on
political economy. He objects to "undertaker" and "adventurer," because
they have other meanings, and suggests the French _entrepreneur_. The
objections are well taken, but the middleman is not only a reality; he
also has a name by which he is known in business. If Prof. Walker wants
to have a cellar dug or rock blasted, he can go to Pennsylvania and find
a "venturer" to undertake the work; and there seems to be no good reason
why a term that is already in common use and well understood should be
rejected by the schoolmen. This is a valuable contribution to political
economy, so valuable, in fact, that we can only _say_ that it should be
read, not demonstrate the fact in a short notice.

* * * * *

"Elsie's Motherhood"[20] is a story in which piety of the Sunday-school
kind is curiously contrasted with villany in the shape of Ku Klux
outrages. Elsie's children are all sweetness, obedience, and kisses, and
live in an atmosphere of goodness that is revolting because it is
monstrous. There is a suspicion of political purpose associated with the
appearance of the book just at this time which does not improve it.

--The author of "Near to Nature's Heart"[21] shows abundant powers of
invention, but his imagination is not sufficiently well regulated for
the production of a natural or even plausible story. The individual who
is so intimate with nature is a young girl whose father has fled from
England and hidden himself in the forests of the Hudson river on account
of a quarrel with his brother, which he (erroneously) supposes to have
been a fatal one. His seclusion is so complete that his daughter grows
up almost without the sight of man or womankind except the three who are
in her father's hut, and the consequence is a partial reversion to the
wild state from which we are nowadays supposed to have been somewhat
removed by the process of evolution. The author dresses the nymph in a
style that ingeniously indicates the character he desires to paint. "Her
attire was as simple as it was strange, consisting of an embroidered
tunic of finely dressed fawn skin, reaching a little below the knee, and
ending in a blue fringe. Some lighter f