read at odd times.

"The Amethyst Box" and "The House in the Mist" are tales of mystery of
rather a grim sort, for there are violent deaths in both, but, as in
all of Mrs. Rohlfs' stories, justice is finally executed upon the
guilty, and the reader's sense of the fitness of things is satisfied.

The only unpleasant feature of "The Caldron and the Ruby" is that
suspicion of theft is directed toward an innocent person; but inasmuch
as, in order to make a detective story, the innocent must be under
suspicion and must be ultimately vindicated, this cannot be considered
in the light of a defect.

* * * * *

Of quite a different character is the tale of Morley Roberts' "Lady
Penelope," L. C. Page & Co. The reader spends most of his time, as it
were, in the wake of a gaseous motor car. Such audacious defiance of
the conventionalities on the part of the heroine, such mystery and
scandal as to her matrimonial ventures, such "racing and chasing" and
automobiling, such varying suitors--all individually represented by
full-page illustrations--such a precociously impudent boy of fourteen
meddling with the plot and acting as Penelope's prime minister, such
mixed-up situations and harum-scarum talk, cannot be found between
ordinary lovers, but the result is amusing, to say nothing more. The
best character in the book is the old duchess, for whose mystification
Penelope's scheme is planned, and who only at the climax discovers,
like the rest of us, which of six men her niece has married, though
all of them lay claim to that honor.

* * * * *

"Return," by Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke, L. C. Page &
Co., is a new version of the taming of a shrew, though in the case of
Diana Chaters, the cure is effected without the intervention of a
Petruchio.

This is the pith of the theme of the story, very briefly put, for, as
she is introduced to us in the opening chapters, she is, with all her
beauty, as hopeless a termagant as can well be conceived, and when she
bids us farewell at the end of the book, the transformation has been
made complete.

The book is filled with color and action, the background of which is
the rather motley life of colonial Georgia, or rather of the time
during which Georgia was being established as a colony for insolvent
debtors through the efforts of General Oglethorpe. The suspicions and
uneasiness existing in the midst of the heterogeneous