hat? The doings of "papists," as
Catholics were designated.

Our pen has carried us from our author. Of course Mr. Fawcett will
say--and say with truth--that his strictures were aimed at the abuse
and not the legitimate use of the drama. But his fault was that he
does not make this clear, and by intimation he leaves himself open to
the charge.

Aside from this, his work is a work of genius; and his story of the
little girl who struggled with such vain endeavor against her
environment will live among the noblest productions of fiction given
us.

_The Professor's Sister_, by Julian Hawthorne (Belford, Clarke &
Co.).--This is the most successful work of a successful novelist, and
holds the reader entranced from the first page till nearly the last.
We say reader, but not all readers. Mr. Hawthorne is as peculiar in
his work as his eminent father was, with a more select audience. He is
at home in the wild, weird production of humanity, touched and marked
by a spiritualism that is far above and beyond the average readers of
romance. If it calls for as much culture, in its way, to enjoy a work
of art as its creation called for in the artist, Mr. Hawthorne's
fictions demand the same tastes and thought the author indulges in.
The little girl who craves love-stories, or the traveller upon the
cars who picks up a book to lose in its pages the wearisome sense of
travel, will scarcely select the _Professor's Sister_, and if he or
she does, will wonder what in the name of Heaven it is all about.

There is another class, however, that will read with avidity and
interest every page of this book, and this class grows wider in our
midst every day. One meets at every turn a man or woman who will tell,
in a matter-of-fact way generally, that is positively comical, of some
experience he or she has had with spooks. This, not the old-fashioned
experience with ghosts. All that has long since been relegated to the
half-forgotten limbo of superstitious things. One hears of communions
with the dead, told off as one would tell of any ordinary occurrence
common to our daily life. This is the natural reaction of the human
mind against the scientific materialism of the day, that seeks to
poison and destroy all religious faith. Religion is as necessary to
health of mind as pure air is to that of body, and when deprived of
either, we struggle for loop-holes of light and breath with
instinctive desperation. Shut out the light of heaven from the s