ctions.

* * * * *

The sewage schemes have had a good many indignant critics and fervent
defenders. Of the former is Mr. Louis Thompson, who says that the sewage
discharged into seacoast harbors floats on the surface, being lighter
than salt water. Its solid portions are cast up on the shore and in
shoal places, there to become the food of animals, among which are shell
fish, that serve for man's food.

* * * * *

Boys' kites can be kept from plunging by making both the wood cross
pieces in the form of a bow, instead of flat. The string is placed a
little above the centre of the upright bow, and a very light tail
attached. These kites are very steady, and if a string attached to one
side of the centre is pulled after the kite has risen, it can be made to
fly as much as thirty degrees from the wind. For this reason it is
proposed to use kites for bringing a vessel to windward.

CURRENT LITERATURE.

Mrs. Annie Edwards's last book[K] does not open well in point of style.
The first paragraph of the first chapter is: "She was a woman of nearly
thirty when I first saw her; a woman spiritless and worn beyond her
years," etc. This beginning not only a chapter but a book with a pronoun
implying an antecedent is very bad, in the low and vulgar way of
badness. It brings to mind the superhuman daily efforts of the "American
humorist" of journalism to be funny; and it should be left to him and to
his kind. And in the next paragraph Mrs. Edwards describes her heroine
as "walking wearily along the weary street of Chesterford St. Mary." Bad
style again, and this time in the way of affectation. A man's way may be
weary if he is tired or weak; but not even then should it be so called,
when he has just been spoken of as weary himself, or as walking wearily;
and weary as applied descriptively to a village street is almost
nonsense. These defects are not important, but they arrest attention as
being at the very opening of the story. And it must be confessed that
for a chapter or two "A Point of Honor" is rather slight in texture and
commonplace. It is, however, interesting enough to lead us on, and the
reader who holds his way into the third or fourth chapter is repaid. The
authoress then warms up to her work, and begins to show her quality,
which is that of a true literary artist. We do not say a great artist,
be it observed, but a true artist. She paints only _ge