MILDRED ARKELL.
“Mrs. Henry Wood certainly possesses in a wholly exceptional degree the power of uniting the most startling incident of supernatural influence with a certain probability and naturalness which compels the most critical and sceptical reader, having once begun, to go on reading.... He finds himself conciliated by some bit of quiet picture, some accent of poetic tenderness, some sweet domestic touch telling of a heart exercised in the rarer experiences; and as he proceeds he wonders more and more at the manner in which the mystery, the criminality, the plotting, and the murdering reconciles itself with a quiet sense of the justice of things; and a great moral lesson is, after all, found to lie in the heart of all the turmoil and exciting scene-shifting. It is this which has earned for Mrs. Wood so high a place among popular novelists, and secured her admittance to homes from which the sensational novelists so-called are excluded.”—The Nonconformist.