TEA, MILK, JAM, AMMUNITION, KNIVES, FORKS, REPEATING
RIFLE, PICKLES, BARBED WIRE, &C., &C."

* * * * *

It would seem a far cry from the clash of armies to the romance of a
honeymoon spent on a raft _de luxe_ drifting lazily down a river of
Burma. That is the theme of _Love's Legend_ (CONSTABLE), by Mr. FIELDING
HALL, author of _The Soul of a People_. But there may be a war of sex
with sex scarcely less tragic than the wars of men with men (or brutes).
The author shows us an oldish husband--a civil servant--who surmounts,
with not too much indelicacy, the primary difficulty of his young wife's
ingenuousness in relation to the sacrament of marriage. But a further
and worse difficulty is waiting for him when he comes to deal with the
incompatibility of the sexes in the matter of moral standards. The
thing, of course, has been done once for all by LOUIS STEVENSON in
_Virginibus Puerisque_. But he did it in essay form; here we have the
piquancy of personal narrative and dialogue. Husband and wife in turn
are responsible for the story, each assuming a partial attitude towards
facts and opinions; or else it is one of his old friends (a source of
foolish jealousy to the wife) who takes up the tale without warning when
they meet at some riverside station. This means a pleasant variety of
styles, and there is a certain childlike freshness about the method by
which the husband adapts himself to his wife's intelligence, presenting
his more difficult arguments in the form of fairy-tales--a habit which
the author may, for all I know, have assimilated through intercourse
with the local native. All goes badly, and things began to threaten an
_impasse_, when one foggy night the raft is cut in two by a paddle-boat
and the pair get separated and nearly killed. They are so pleased to be
restored to one another alive that they tacitly agree to waive their
differences. It is perhaps rather a puerile _denouement_, and not likely
to be very helpful to the newly-wedded public. There must be very few
couples who can count on having their elemental differences healed by
means of a collision between a honeymoon raft and a paddle-steamer on a
Burmese river. All the same I commend the book, for it has a charm of
manner that will appeal to all. As for its matter, half of it will seem
sound to you if you are a male, and most irritating if you are a female;
and the other way about with the other half. Personally, being a