ot know who the author of Helen's
Babies is--he, and Helen, and her babies being alike strangers to us;
but he is a clever writer, and a humorist, with no little dramatic
power. His personages are studies from nature, and have individuality
and life; albeit they reveal a somewhat narrow horizon of observation.
He uses largely, but always humorously, the western style of
exaggeration; as, for example, when he makes one of his reformers tell a
steamboat captain that if he will stop drinking whiskey, he will make a
reputation, and "be as famous as the Red River raft or the Mammoth
Cave--_the only thing of the sort west of the Alleghanies_." He
describes his people in a way that shows that he has them in the eye of
his imagination; as in this portrait of a Mrs. Tappelmine: "With face,
hair, eyes, and garments of the same color, the color itself being
neutral; small, thin, faded, inconspicuous, poorly clad, bent with
labors which had yielded no return, as dead to the world as saints
strive to be, _yet remaining in the world for the sake of those whom she
had often wished out of it_," etc. The book is in every way clever, and
its purpose is admirable--the lesson which it is written to teach being
that personal effort and personal sacrifice on the part of reformers is
necessary to reclaim hard drinkers. But the radical fault of all such
moral story writing is that the writer makes his puppets do as he likes.
The drinking steamboat captain yields to the persuasions of his friend,
and even submits to necessary personal restraint. But how if he had not
yielded? Old Tappelmine gives up his whiskey for the sake of money and
employment, which inducements are strongly backed by his neutral-colored
wife; but how if he had been brutally selfish and immovable? In both
these cases, and in all the others, failure was at least quite as likely
as success. People in real life cannot be managed as they can upon
paper. Still the book contains a truth, and is likely to do good.

--The same publishers have also brought out an illustrated book by
Bayard Taylor,[M] which is suitable to the coming holiday season. It is
a collection of short tales of adventure in different parts of the
world, in which boys take a prominent part. It is one of the fruits of
the author's extended travels, and is manly, simple, and healthy--a very
good sort of book for those for whom it is intended, which, in these
days of mawkish or feverish "juvenile" literature, is sa