ames sometimes,
if not often, are, adored by her pupils. Annette dies at last, and M.
Rod strews the dust of many others on her way to death. An American
brother of the typical kind plays a large part. He is tamed partly by
Annette, partly by a charming wife, whom M. Rod must needs kill, without
any particular reason. _L'Eau Courante_ is an even gloomier story. It
begins with a fair picture of a home-coming of bride and bridegroom, on
a beautiful evening, to an ideal farm high up on the shore of Leman. In
a very few pages M. Rod, as usual, kills the wife after subjecting her
to exceptional tortures at the births of her children, and then settles
down comfortably to tell us the ruin of the husband, who ends by arson
of his own lost home and drowning in his own lost pond. The interval is
all blunder, misfortune, and folly--the chief _causa malorum_ being a
senseless interference with the "servitude" rights of neighbours, whom
he does not like, by stopping, for a week, a spring on his own land.
Almost the only cheerful character in the book (except a delightful
_juge de conciliation_, who carries out his benevolent duties in his
cellar, dispensing its contents to soften litigants) is a black
billy-goat named Samuel, who, though rather diabolical, is in a way the
"Luck of the Bertignys," and after selling whom their state is doomed.
But we see very little of him.

The summing up need probably not be long. That M. Rod was no mere
stuffer of the shelves of circulating libraries must have been made
clear; that he could write excellently has been (with all due modesty)
confessed; that he could sometimes be poignant, often vivid, even
occasionally humorous, is true. He has given us a fresh illustration of
that tendency of the later novel, to "fill all numbers" of ordinary
life, which has been insisted upon. But that he is too much of a "dismal
Jemmy" of novel-writing is certainly true also. The House of Mourning is
one of the Houses of Life, and therefore open to the novelist. But it is
not the _only_ house. It would sometimes seem as if M. Rod were (as
usual without his being able to help it) a sort of _jettatore_,--as if
there were no times or places for him except that

When all the world is old,
And all the trees are brown,
And all the sport is cold,
And all the wheels run down.

[Sidenote: _Scenes de la Vie Cosmopolite._]

But there is something to add, and even one book not yet noticed to
comment