NOTES.
Self-deception and superstition nowhere reign more supremely, at least in civilized communities, than among the wretched devotees of the gaming-table, who are ever promising themselves to quit the mad pursuit, ever flattering themselves that the next coup will be their last, and always expecting that some quite supernatural piece of luck in that final coup will secure the long-sought fortune. Some time ago we referred in a "Note" to the fanciful combinations which the gamesters of Europe had been making, in their play, on the numerals connected with the death of Napoleon III. M. de Villemessant in his last work gives a very ludicrous instance of the extent to which a superstitious gambler can carry his belief in presentiments, in theories of luck and in prognostications. He tells us that a certain Paris vaudevillist was persuaded that if a man unexpectedly found a piece of money when destitute, it would bring him good luck. Accordingly, before setting foot in a gambling-house he never failed to hide—from himself—a coin in the bottom of a pocket, where he was fully determined to forget it. When he had lost his all (except, of course, the aforesaid lucky piece) he would put on his overcoat, tie up his comforter, seize his umbrella, and open the door, when, all of a sudden, his hand happening to be thrust by mere chance into his watch-fob, would, wonderful to relate! hit upon the very piece whose existence he had pledged himself never to suspect save in the case of direst need. "What a streak of luck!" he then regularly exclaimed. "I can't be mistaken, can I? It isn't a louis, any way? By George, it is! Well, if this isn't luck alive!" Then our good vaudevillist would hurry back, deposit his umbrella, unroll his muffler, shed his overcoat, throw his lucky louis on the cloth—and lose it! After all, incredible as this story seems, M. Villemessant's vaudevillist is but a type of a great class of men who deceive themselves by devices which in others they would pronounce monstrosities of silliness, and who hug their delusions with a gravity none the less profound from their own half consciousness of the sham.
It was a theory, we believe, of that profound philosopher, Mr. Weller senior, that turnpike-keepers were confirmed misanthropes, who, after a bitter experience in life, had sought that occupation as a means of venting their spleen against everybody who should come their way. We have never observed in our own experience—more limited, it is true, than the meditative Tony's—that the milk of human kindness is specially sour in the breasts of tollgate-keepers; nevertheless, there are few occupations in which a man delighting to worry his fellow-creatures in a small way could more effectually do so. The pike-keeper inflicts daily a legion of infinitesimal annoyances. He stops people who are in a hurry, and forces them to find change for the toll—stops them in the fierce sun, in the drenching rain, in the thick of a snow-storm or at dead of night. He puts an ignoble end to the excited trotting-match on the road: he alike mercilessly pulls up Paterfamilias hurrying for the doctor and the city man struggling to catch the train. Often, though the toll itself is a trifle, yet the loss of those two minutes which would have saved the appointment or caught the train, nay, even the bore of pulling off one's gloves and pulling out one's wallet with the mercury below zero, tries the traveler's temper. The emancipation of highways from all taxes levied upon wayfarers is a mark of modern civilization. The mediæval plan was to extort a toll from every luckless traveler in the name of baron or bandit. In our day Algerine corsairs, Italian brigands, Chinese pirates and Mexican guerillas have continued the thievish custom of "tributes," and not long ago even Montana Indians established themselves on the leading roads and levied tolls from the passers-by. The civilized differs from the savage or feudal practice in rendering an equivalent for the contributions exacted—that is, it provides from their proceeds a stout bridge or a smooth turnpike, and keeps it steadily in repair. But the county or State should take care of highways and bridges without putting an impost on travel. Especially in the suburbs of cities is the preservation of tolls a relic of commercial barbarism. In New England they have gradually become almost extinct, cities or counties having bought the franchises originally granted to private companies. These petty exactions upon the freedom of travel ought to cease everywhere.
It is well known that many persons who scrupulously refrain from perusing Lord Byron's Don Juan, yet enjoy witnessing Mozart's opera of Don Giovanni, following the libretto with assiduity, and laughing with special heartiness at Leporello's song as it rehearses the adventures of his master. In the same way, many who are rather shocked at Camille, find no trouble in listening to La Traviata, and weep for the woes of Favorita when that opera thrown into the form of an English novel excites their censure or disgust. The fact is, that the Italian language, like the cloak of charity, covereth a multitude of sins. Never did it cover them more strikingly than in an instance recounted by L'Eclipse. The present French government, according to that paper, lately prohibited the theatre of La Porte Saint-Martin from playing Le Roi s'amuse of Victor Hugo, a piece familiar to Frenchmen in its reading edition for two-score years. The edict seems to have been rather arbitrary, since, whatever its morality, at least the play could give no political offence, there being but the remotest kind of comparison possible between the court of Francis I. and the government of Marshal MacMahon. But be this as it may, on the very day after its prohibition of Le Roi s'amuse the government inserted in its budget a subvention of a hundred thousand francs for the Théâtre Italien, whose favorite performance is Rigoletto. Now, Rigoletto is only a bad Italian translation of Le Roi s'amuse; so that the droll spectacle was offered of the government prohibiting one theatre, at a great loss, from playing the very same piece which next day it offered another theatre twenty thousand dollars for playing in Italian! The Eclipse satirically suggests that the secret must be that "entrer par la fenêtre" becomes harmless as entrare per la finestra, and "donner la main" is innocent as "donare la mano" and that Italian purifies everything. If this be so, could not the Paris journalists borrow a useful hint from the affair, and avoid suspension by the government through the simple device of turning into Italian verses, of the operatic sort, those passages of the editorial articles which if printed in French would provoke the censor's ire?
During the recent disgraceful squabble and riot of the monks around Jerusalem there was one incident that should especially pain all lovers of art. This was the destruction of the two pictures by Murillo in the Bethlehem church that fell a victim to ecclesiastical fury. They were true Murillos, and masterpieces; and, what is worse, having been despatched to the church immediately on their execution, and there retained, it is believed that they have never been engraved. They were unusually well preserved, too, for, on being placed in the oratory of La Crèche, both canvases had been covered with glass to protect them from candle-smoke. One of the subjects was the Nativity, the other the Adoration of the Magi. In reading with involuntary indignation and disgust of this barbarous instance of iconoclasm, one is reminded of what Thackeray wrote on the same scene and topic nearly thirty years ago. In his Journey from Cornhill to Cairo, speaking of the leading Christian sects in and around Jerusalem, he says: "These three main sects hate each other; their quarrels are interminable; each bribes and intrigues with the heathen lords of the soil to the prejudice of his neighbor. Now it is the Latins who interfere, and allow the common church to go to ruin, because the Greeks purpose to roof it; now the Greeks demolish a monastery on Mount Olivet, and leave the ground to the Turks, rather than allow the Armenians to possess it. On another occasion, the Greeks having mended the Armenian steps which lead to the (so-called) Cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the latter asked for permission to destroy the work of the Greeks, and did so. And so round this sacred spot, the centre of Christendom, the representatives of the three great sects worship under one roof, and hate each other!" The church of La Crèche is, as its name implies, the church of "The Manger" (i. e., the reputed place of the nativity of Christ); and to this spot, and the furious wrangles of which it has been the scene, we may therefore apply the exclamation which Thackeray makes regarding the tomb of Christ: "What a place to choose for imposture, good God!—to sully with brutal struggles for self-aggrandizement or shameful schemes of gain!" The Germans had the grace to try to spare with their bombs the spire of Strasburg cathedral; religious fanaticism in the Middle Ages directed itself to the destruction of "pagan" art, no matter how beautiful; but in these enlightened days for ecclesiastical fury to take up the barbarous rôle of destruction, which even savage war discards, is pitiable indeed.
Comeliness becomes every day more and more an affair of chemistry. Science has now found what bids fair to be a very "glass of fashion"—not a metaphorical, but a literal glass, at least for lean people. The chemical properties of each color in the solar spectrum have long been known, and of late years it has also been discovered that plants may be made to thrive wonderfully in green-houses constructed of blue or violet panes, the production of such nurseries being sometimes doubled or trebled by this device. But the experiment has been pushed further, for some English chemists maintain that rooms provided with violet windows, or even with hangings of that color, will fatten the occupants! Shakespeare's "glass wherein the noble youth did dress themselves" was not so practical a possession as this. Surely, hereafter those who would divest themselves of their lean and hungry look may grow obese at will, and turn the scale at the very pound required; and this, too, by no such regimen as the Oriental one of rice and indolence, but merely by passing a season under a violet dome or a blue crystal green-house. Such a remedy is good tidings for all the wan, the haggard and the wizened of society, and for those "whom sharp misery has worn to the bone." Henceforth there need be no "starvelings," "elf-skins" or "dried neat's tongues" of leanness for the Falstaffs to mock. And the fat men, too, the "huge hills of flesh," shall they not have their complementary color in their windows to make them thin? Let the compassionate Bantings look to it.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY
A Simpleton: A Story of the Day. By Charles Reade. New York: Harper & Brothers.
In a preface to the English edition of this book Mr. Reade grapples with the charge of plagiarism so often urged against his stories, and, justifying his habitual course by precedents, forestalls the search of the detectives in the present case by proclaiming the sources from which incidents and descriptions have been gathered. Having treated of many matters beyond the range of his personal knowledge and experience, he has necessarily had recourse to the writings of other men, and by citing his authorities he not only clears himself of the suspicion of surreptitious borrowing, but establishes the truthfulness, or at least the plausibility, of what might otherwise have been considered improbable inventions. This frankness, which, after all, sheds no new light upon his method of composition, seems to have had the happy, if undesigned, effect of throwing his critics off the true scent. The real plagiarism in A Simpleton lies not in the details, but in the conception. The "situation" which leads to all the embroilments and developments is the apparently ill-assorted union of a man of science and genius, absorbed in the labors of investigation and discovery, practical in his views of life and upright in all his actions, with an ill-trained and unintellectual beauty, whose perfections of form and face, pretty coquetry, studied artlessness and sweet recognition of the value of masculine knowledge and strength as the proper stay of feminine weakness and the proper organ of the feminine will, assail the superior being just at that point where his perceptions are weakest, and lead him an easy captive. When we add that this Samson is a young medical man, marked out for the highest honors of his profession, and that his career is temporarily blighted at the outset through the extravagance, silliness and deception of his wife, we have given an outline which no reader of Middlemarch will require to have paralleled. Dr. Christopher Staines is matched and contrasted with Rosa Lusignan, precisely as Lydgate is matched and contrasted with Rosamond Vincy. There is even a further resemblance in the minor pairing and natural dissonance of Phebe Dale and Reginald Falcon in the one book and of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy in its predecessor; while Lady Cicely Treherne, though her simplicity, unlike that of Dorothea, is merely assumed, is almost as unworldly as that heroine, makes a similar use of her wealth and social advantages, stands in much the same relation to the other characters, serves them in the same manner, and ends by marrying her Will Ladislaw under the designation of a "mercurial Irish gentleman" not further introduced to the reader. It will be understood that it is not the characters, in the proper sense of the word, that Mr. Reade has borrowed. In fact, George Eliot's characters are too intimately associated with their surroundings, the circumstances in which they are placed enter too largely as elements into their nature, to allow of their being transplanted without losing all identity. And on the other hand, Mr. Reade, for a reason to be mentioned hereafter, is quite incapable of borrowing characters—still using the word in its most rigid meaning: the characters in his books are always in an emphatic sense his own. The plot, too, and the action of the one book, bear as little resemblance to those of the other as an exhibition of fireworks bears to the "after-glow" of an Alpine sunset. It is, as we have said, the "situation" which Mr. Reade has taken, and this with a palpable purpose, as if, after reading Middlemarch, he had said: "Ha! here is a good idea; but George Eliot, with her commonplace, humdrum way of treating things, has missed the effects of which it was capable. I, Charles Reade, who see beneath the surface, besides being a master of pyrotechnics, will work up the theme in that flashing, whizzing, startling, dazzling way which shall reveal its full proportions as well as my own transcendent powers." Accordingly, while Rosamond continues to be Rosamond throughout, each fresh exhibition of her traits only showing their natural growth or furthering the reader's knowledge of them, Rosa passes through the swift transformations which a "Hey, presto!" is quite sufficient to announce. In the early part of the book she is an embodiment of silliness, levity and selfishness—in the latter part she is reason, self-devotion and passionate love personified. As for Dr. Staines, there is no need of any apotheosis in his case: as the hero of the book he must perforce be that renowned prestidigitateur whom Mr. Reade long since presented to an admiring audience as the principal performer in his troupe. It is needless, therefore, to say that he goes through the programme with the highest dexterity and éclat, displaying the marvelous knowledge, encountering the terrific dangers, achieving the prodigies which belong to his part, without the least falling off in vivacity or suppleness. When he finally hurls his treacherous friend from a cottage window and impales him on the garden railings, who can withhold the well-merited applause?
It may seem paradoxical to say of a very successful novel-writer that he has mistaken his vocation, yet such, we think, is Mr. Reade's case. For the novelist, as for the dramatist, an essential combination is that of a strong individuality with an equal endowment of the imitative faculty. This union is found, perhaps, in its perfection only in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's personages bear the double stamp of their own individuality and of their creator's. In their appropriate diversity their origin is still apparent. Their fidelity to Nature is never that of literal copies. When Lear says, "Undo this button," we are thrilled with the reality of the trait, but we do not suspect it of having been borrowed from real life. On the contrary, it glows with the heat of that imaginative power whose office it is to transfuse reality—to seize truth in its essence and idealize it in form. Descending to two writers in whom this combination is also strong, we may notice how, nevertheless, the balance inclines to one side or the other. There are many passages of Jane Austen which read like transcripts of actual conversations: one might suppose them to have been done by a skillful reporter. In George Eliot's books, on the other hand, the spontaneity of the actors is checked by the brooding, analytical spirit of the author: their verisimilitude is perfect, but their dramatic capabilities do not always have the free play necessary to their complete exhibition and appropriate effect. Turning now to Mr. Reade, we find that in him one element of this combination—the power of impersonation—is utterly lacking. His own individuality protrudes itself at every point. His characters are all identical in essence—all imbued with the confidence, the unflagging ardor, the impetuosity and extravagance of the same ideal. It is in vain that he labels them with different designations: no sooner do they begin to speak and move than every tone and gesture reveals the familiar type. The poor, mean-spirited creature intended to contrast with the hero turns out to be only his pale reflection. Distinctions of sex and age, of race and education, are merely superficial. High or low, good or bad, they are all equally knowing and equally self-willed. The women may talk of bonnets, but their lofty and fiery souls glow through the twaddle. The children have an infantile prattle, but the schoolmaster, overhearing it, would at once remark that it was only that boy Reade holding one of his strange colloquies with himself.
With this incapacity to understand the diverse springs of human action, Mr. Reade is clearly no novelist in the true sense of the term. He is, however, an admirable describer and a capital story-teller. He is consequently always entertaining and secure of his reader. Yet, inasmuch as he professes to relate and describe only actual facts, we cannot but regret that he should have adopted a form which is ill suited to this object, and which makes him a mere retailer of other people's observations. In the book before us he paints the interior of Africa from somebody else's information: had he gone thither himself his picture would have had great value. So, too, he is continually instructing us about the processes used in the arts and manufactures; but his knowledge being gained at second hand and crammed for the occasion, we mistrust the teacher. If he would apply himself to such matters, and give us the results of his experience, our gain would be great. He could not, of course, as now, traverse the whole field; but what his teaching might lose in superficial extent would be more than made good by its greater accuracy and reliability. He might select, for instance, the useful art of coopering. We know his powers, we appreciate his genius. It is safe to say that a cask made in accordance with his directions, after he had served a short apprenticeship, would not only be fair to see and easy to handle, but would also hold water. This is more than we should venture to affirm of the plot of any of his novels.
The Fishing Tourist. By Charles Hallock. New York: Harper & Brothers.
I Go A-Fishing. By W. C. Prime. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Mr. Hallock tells us in his preface that his province is to write an anglers' guide without embellishment. It would have been well if he had adhered to this plan. After some pages of high-flown periods he informs us that twenty-six years ago fly-fishing was in its infancy, being scarcely known in America, and but little practiced in England. If he had asserted that fly-fishing was scarcely known among his "green hills" at that period, and but little practiced in Hampshire county, the statement need not have been impugned; but hundreds of books have been written upon this art in England since the time of Dame Juliana Berners, and in America fifty years ago there existed many such practitioners as Fay, Eckley and Bethune.
When Mr. Hallock treats of the natural history of his favorite fishes he is equally unfortunate; which is the less remarkable since he gets his science from W. H. Herbert, a writer who knew little of American ichthyology. As a specimen of the methods of that "cautious student," as our author calls him, Herbert, pretending to quote from Agassiz, who in his Tour to Lake Superior described a new salmon of that lake under the name of Salmo Siskowet, calls it Salmo Siskowitz, and this mistake Hallock repeats. Again, Herbert writing of the great northern pickerel, calls it "Esox lucioides, Agassiz;" the fact being that Professor Agassiz describes it in his Lake Superior as Esox boreas. This mistake of Herbert has been perpetuated by most of the popular writers, Norris, Roosevelt, etc. Mr. Hallock calls the sea-trout Salmo trutta, again copying Herbert, while all naturalists now give it the name bestowed upon it by Hamilton Smith, Salmo Canadensis, it being very distinct from Salmo trutta, which is a European species. Mr. Hallock writes of the "toag of Lakes Pepin, Moosehead and St. Croix." Now, Lake Pepin contains no large gray trout; in fact, with the exception of Salmo fontinalis, its fishes are all of the Western type. He also mentions "the common lake-trout of New York and New England, Salmo confinis, DeKay," which is identical with the toag, just mentioned. Dr. A. L. Adams of the British army, in a recent work on the Natural History of New Brunswick, calls it "the togue or toladi, Salmo confinis, DeKay, the gray-spotted lake-trout." Mr. Hallock asserts that Salmo Sebago is a monster brook-trout, like those of the Rangely lakes. Dr. Adams states that this name, Salmo Sebago, was applied to the Schoodic salmon, Salmo Gloveri, by Girard, in 1853; the species being first observed in that lake, where it is now said to be extinct.
As a guide-book, The Fishing Tourist is not without value, for a work on this plan was needed. An unfortunate spirit of exaggeration seems, however, to pervade the narrative. What remarkable good luck a man must have who kills a four-pound trout at Bartlett's! How fortunate is he who can make an average of two-pound trout in a New Hampshire river! Our experience teaches us that it is dangerous to guarantee that no trout under ten ounces will be found in the Tabasintoc, though one might say that of the Novelle, another New Brunswick river. When Mr. Hallock states that the trout in the "Big Woods" of Wisconsin are lamentably ignorant of the angler's wiles, he must be referring to a remote period: we find them now very wide awake, and meet almost as many anglers on Rush River as on the Raquette.
Mr. Prime's book is a very pleasant one. Evidently the work of a scholar, it indulges in none of those spasmodic efforts of eloquence which are the joy of the newspaper correspondent. Perhaps there is something too much of the Iskander Effendi and the Sea of Galilee to be congruous with the St. Regis and Franconia Notch, but the dialogue is natural, the fishing adventures are painted with a modest brush, the trout are not incredibly large or numerous, and the whole tone of the book is well suited to summer reading, when, on your return from a long tramp by the river-side, you wish to take your ease in the society of a sympathizing author. Mr. Prime treats of well-known resorts, the much-whipped St. Regis lakes and the depleted streams of Connecticut and New Hampshire, but even among these familiar scenes he is able to find something new, or at least they are described in a fresh and lively way. The book is worthy to rest on the same shelf with Walton, Davy, Wilson, and the other classics of the angler's library. There are some sketches of fly-fishing in European waters which will be interesting to American anglers, and there is much pleasant talk about old books.
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. By Walter Bagehot. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
In England, as in America, notes are a legal tender, the Bank of England notes corresponding in that respect to our greenbacks. An American banker is safe if he have enough greenbacks to pay all probable demands, though the value of these changes as our government chooses to enlarge or contract the issue. The number of attainable bank-notes is not so elastic, however, in England as with us: the issue department of the Bank of England is limited, by an act of Parliament passed in 1844, to fifteen millions of pounds. For the last few years that bank, in addition to its fifteen millions in notes, has retained something like twenty millions in coin. It has not uniformly, though, been so rich: three times since 1847 its banking department has been reduced to a figure of three million pounds or under. On these occasions "Peel's Act" has been suspended to tide over the affairs of the embarrassed bank, and its business could not have survived if the law had not been broken. The bank which has thus three times practically given out in a quarter of a century is, however, so thoroughly protected by prestige, by national and international confidence, that it is the custodian of the reserves belonging to all Lombard street and to all the country banks of England, as well as those of Scotch and Irish bankers. And "since the Franco-German war," says Mr. Bagehot, "we may be said to keep the European reserve also." All great communities have at times to pay large sums in cash, and of that cash a great store must be kept somewhere. Formerly, there were two such stores in Europe: one was the Bank of France, and the other the Bank of England. But since the suspension of specie payments by the Bank of France its use as a reservoir of specie is at an end: no one can draw a cheque on it and be sure of getting gold for it. Accordingly, the whole liability for such international payments in cash is thrown on the Bank of England. The accumulations secured ultimately by this bank represent a remarkable share of the national wealth. England is the only European country where small savers commit their money to custody: France has never recovered from the timidity consequent on Law's failure, and still hoards its petty sums in stockings; Holland and Germany have never felt secure from invasion. England alone trusts its whole gain to a bank, and demands interest for it. The vast amount of idle gold distributed through the homes of France and Germany is not tangible, is not money "of the money market." The hoards of France can only be tempted from their torpor by a vast national misfortune and by a great loan in French securities. But the English money is borrowable money. The British are bold lenders, and even if they were not so, the mere fact that their money lies in a bank makes it far more obtainable. Millions in the hand of a banker are a power, whereas distributed through a nation they cannot be asked for, and are no power at all. It is thus that Lombard street stands ready to lend to all civilized or partly civilized governments at different rates, and builds railways in indigent states all over the world. For, though "English bankers are not themselves very great lenders to foreign countries, they are great lenders to those who lend." Rude and poor countries and undeveloped! colonies find in Lombard street a fund into which they may dip at a suitable premium, and thus possess a chance of material felicity which was never the privilege of any previous epoch. This vast machine, however, the legacy of unnumbered years, is not an ideally perfect custodian of the wealth entrusted to it. The reforms called for by a long experience are what the most important part of Mr. Bagehot's volume is devoted to. Some permanent and skilled authority to rule the bank is the principal novelty suggested; but the French plan will not do for England. The direct appointment of a governor by the Crown would not lessen the difficulty. The American law, saying that each national bank shall have a fixed proportion of cash to its liabilities, Mr. Bagehot considers one of many reforms which the English could not adopt if they would: "in a sensitive state of the British money-market the near approach to the legal limit of reserve would be a sure incentive to panic." The difficulties of remodeling such an institution as the Bank of England are the most curiously developed portion of Mr. Bagehot's treatise, where all is curiously and intelligently handled. The book is interesting to outsiders as well as to professionals.
Wau-Ban: The Early Day in the North-west. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
This is a reprint, in a condensed and convenient form, of a work written some twenty years ago by Mrs. John H. Kinzie of Chicago. It is a real contribution to the early history of the North-west, and contains enough of romantic adventure to form the basis of half a dozen novels. The story of the massacre of Chicago in 1812 is one of the most thrilling in American history, and it is here told by an eye-witness. Still, it is difficult to realize that sixty years ago a wagon-load of children were tomahawked by Indians in what is now the heart of the great City of the Lakes.
The family of Kinzie had certainly a remarkable history, beginning with the female ancestor who was captured by savages in the early history of the country, through that generation who were the founders of Chicago, down to the living representative of the family, who in 1830 entered one hundred and sixty acres of the present town at the government price, one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, and only paid for one hundred, thinking, as he said, that that quantity of land would be all he should ever want or could find a use for. The rejected portion is now worth from two to three millions of dollars. A hundred years hence, when Chicago will perhaps contain a million or two of inhabitants, the name of this family of pioneers will be as memorable as that of Winthrop in Boston or Stuyvesant in New York.
Books Received.
De Witt's Acting Plays: No. 142. Dollars and Cents: A Comedy. By L. J. Hollenius.—No. 145. First Love: A Comedy. From the French of Eugene Scribe. By L. J. Hollenius. New York: R. M. De Witt.
Memoirs of the Founding and Progress of the United States Naval Observatory. By Professor J. E. Nourse, U.S.N. Washington Government Printing-Office.
America Picturesque: A Visit to the Academy. By Henry Blackburn, late editor of "London Society." New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
Expression: Its Anatomy and Philosophy. By Sir Charles Bell, K. H. Illustrated. New York: S.R. Wells.
The Mystery of Metropolisville. By Edward Eggleston. Illustrated. New York: Orange Judd & Co.
Bits of Talk about Home Matters, By H. H., author of "Bits of Travel." Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The Lawrences: A Twenty-Years' History. By Charlotte Turnbull. New York: American News Co.
The Forty-five Guardsmen. By Alexandre Dumas. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers.
Lars: A Pastoral of Norway. By Bayard Taylor. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.
The New York City "Ring." By S. J. Tilden. New York: Press of John Polhemus.
Poems of the Plains. By William Darwin Crabb. Cambridge: Riverside Press.
Woman's Wrong. By Mrs. Eiloart. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers.
Adventures of Kwei, the Chinese Girl. By Myra. Boston: Henry Hoyt.