stead in love, which Miss Anthony obligingly
consents to give him. The other characters mostly expiate their crimes
and misdemeanors in a succession of tragic and unpleasant incidents, and
one closes the book with annoyance that so raw, tentative, and
unpleasant a story should have been forced upon one's attention by its
bearing the signature of a writer who can do so much better.

"A Social Experiment" treats of the experiences of a pretty mill-girl,
the daughter of a washerwoman, who becomes the _protegee_ of a wealthy
and capricious woman of the world, who educates her, introduces her to
society, then finally drops her and permits her to seek her native
obscurity, where she withers and dies of a broken heart. The story is
very well told, but with a good deal of needless discussion as to the
right or wrong of the experiment. The heroine has complicated matters by
a secret marriage to a man in her own rank of life, which later becomes
distasteful to her, and the duties of which she refuses to fulfil. Like
the three preceding novels in our list, "A Social Experiment" is rather
doleful, and seems to have been written for any other purpose rather
than to cheer and stimulate the average reader who longs for pictures of
life which rouse pleasant fancies and kindle tender sentiments. None of
these books are in the least degree commonplace, but, by excluding what
is chiefly dear and precious to the heart and mind of common humanity,
they exclude many of the qualities which achieve success for a novel.

In "For Lilias," on the other hand, the author avails herself of all the
agreeable traditions of English fiction: there are warm and well-lighted
rooms, well-to-do people, regular meals, afternoon tea, plenty of
bread-and-butter, and a gentle ripple of friendly, soft-voiced
conversation. This may not be original or exciting, but, after a good
deal of crude sensation through some thousand and odd pages, "ways of
pleasantness and paths of peace" are refreshing to the critic, who
believes that although the novelist should not sacrifice his meaning to
the requisitions of mere agreeableness, out of regard for art and the
taste of his readers, he should still have beauty in some degree or
other as his chief end in view.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] So I had written, led to agree with the anthropologists who
hold this view, by my own observations among the Indians of every State
and Territory in our West: the more I have seen and read of the