ant book by a simple effort of
memory. By letting the mind's eye travel back carefully and vigilantly
over the scenes of a youth passed in a rural part of New England, and
taking notes of its journey, she has made a graphic picture of life in
that corner of the country forty years ago. Not a few men and women who
were "raised" there have carried away, bit for bit, the same
reminiscences, so exactly does one New England landscape resemble
another, in details of foreground at least. The same description of
orchard, stone walls or old well will fit any farm in Maine or
Massachusetts, and fond recollection sniffs the same odor of sputtering
doughnuts through the kitchen-door, whether it carries one back to the
Green hills or the White. Recollections are alike, but impressions
differ, one class of minds retaining the sense of bareness and gloom
which is so continually insisted upon in some New England books, and
others, as in the book before us, dwelling lovingly upon the wholesome
flavor, pungent yet mellow, which gives New England country life a
distinctive charm unlike anything else either in this or the
mother-country. Even the Sunday is pleasant to look back upon to E.H.
Arr; which is probably one instance of the fact that retrospective
pleasure is sometimes totally disproportionate to present enjoyment.

The author is more successful in her treatment of landscape than of
figures. Her village people are shown too much under one aspect: she
possesses none of the humor which dares to take the most opposite
traits, the grotesque and the beautiful alike, and blend them in a
sound, artistic whole. Her characters are evidently drawn from life,
but we miss the many little touches which would make them alive. An
essay on "Old Trees" contains some of the best work in the book, with
its charming sketch of an old orchard, bringing to view the twisted
trees and even the irregularities of the ground, and to the palate a
sharp after-taste of yellowing apples picked up from tufts of matted
grass. After all, the New England of the writer's bygones does not
differ essentially from the New England of to-day, though a more vivid
study of life would perhaps have brought out more contrasts between the
two.

_Books Received_.

Homo Sum: A Novel. By Georg Ebers. From the German by Clara Bell. New
York: William S. Gottsberger.

Unto the Third and Fourth Generation: A Study. By Helen Campbell. New
York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert.