OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
"Dear Miss DOLLIE RADFORD," writes the Assistant-Reader, "I trust I am right in the feminine and unconjugal prefix; but, be that as it may, I wish simply to tell you that, at the instigation of a lettered friend, I have spent a few moments very wisely in reading your thin little book of verse, A Light Load. (ELKIN MATHEWS.) I feel now as if I had been gently drifting down a smooth broad river under the moonlight, when all nature is quiet. I don't quite know why I feel like that, but I fancy it must be on account of some serene and peaceful quality in your poems. Here, then, there are sixty-four little pages of restfulness for those whose minds are troubled. You don't plunge into the deep of metaphysics and churn it into a foam, but you perch on your little bough and pipe sweetly of gorse and heather and wide meadows and brightly-flashing insects; you sing softly as when, in your own words—
"—gently this evening the ripples break
On the pebbles beneath the trees,
With a music as low as the full leaves make,
When they stir in some soft sea-breeze."
One of my "Co." says he always reads anything that comes in his way bearing the trade-mark BLACKWOOD. His faith has been justified on carrying off with him on a quiet holiday, His Cousin Adair, by GORDON ROY. The book has all the requisites of a good novel, including the perhaps rarest one of literary style. Cousin Adair is well worth knowing, and her character is skilfully portrayed. As a foil against this high-minded, pure-souled unselfish girl, there are sketched in two or three of the sort of people, men and women, more frequently met with in this wicked world. But Cousin Adair is good enough to leaven the lump. GORDON ROY is evidently a nom de plume that might belong to man or woman. My "Co." is inclined to think, from certain subtle touches, that he has been entertained through three volumes by a lady.
BARON DE BOOK-WORMS & Co.