EXCELLENT BOOKS.
Six Months at Mrs. Prior’s. By Emily Adams. Illustrated. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. $1.25.
“In this fresh little story, which is addressed especially to young girls, the author tries to impress the lesson that the disagreeable and annoying duties of life may be made pleasant by accepting them as inevitable, and asking help from above. Mrs. Prior is the widow of a clergyman, and has been left with five little ones to support. She discharges her servant, and divides the lighter duties of the household between herself and the two eldest of her children, Minnie and Helen. Unaccustomed to any thing but study and play, the girls find it very hard to have their old time appointments for enjoyment circumscribed, and complain bitterly at first. The book gives a history of their experience, and shows how the work that was so irksome at first became in the end a source of pleasure and means of healthful discipline.
“Six Months at Mrs. Prior’s” is a sweet story of womanly tact combined with Christian trust. A widow, with scanty means, makes a home happy for a group of children, restless, wayward and aspiring, like many American children of our day. The mother’s love holds them, her thrift cares for them, her firmness restrains, and her christian words and life win them to noble aims and living. The influence of the christian household is widely felt, and the quiet transforming leaven works in many homes. We can’t have too many books of this kind in the family or Sunday-school.”
Miss Pricilla Hunter, by Pansy, opens a new view for that charming writer, but one eminently popular at the present time. It deals with the payment of a church debt, and shows how an humble woman, with a Christian character which gave power to her words, raised the money to pay off a debt which had long been a hindrance to church growth and to Christian benevolence. Why she did it, and how she did it, is told in Pansy’s best fashion: her encounters with crabbed folks, and stingy folks, and folks determined not to give to the church debt, are highly amusing, as well as her devices to get something from everybody.
RECENT BOOKS.
Yensie Walton. By Mrs. S. R. Graham Clark. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. $1.50.
Of the many good books which the Messrs. Lothrop have prepared for the shelves of Sunday-school libraries, “Yensie Walton” is one of the best. It is a sweet, pure story of girl life, quiet as the flow of a brook, and yet of sufficient interest to hold the attention of the most careless reader. Yensie is an orphan, who has found a home with an uncle, a farmer, some distance from the city. Her aunt, a coarse, vulgar woman, and a tyrant in the household, does her best to humiliate her by making her a domestic drudge, taking away her good clothing and exchanging it for coarse, ill-filling garments, and scolding her from morning till night. This treatment develops a spirit of resistance; the mild and affectionate little girl becomes passionate and disobedient, and the house is the scene of continual quarrels. Fortunately, her uncle insists upon her attending school, and in the teacher, Miss Gray, she finds her first real friend. In making her acquaintance a new life begins for her. She is brought in contact with new and better influences, and profiting by them becomes in time a sunbeam in her uncle’s house, and the means of softening the heart and quieting the tongue of the aunt who was once her terror and dread. Mrs. Clark has a very pleasing style, and is especially skilful in the construction of her stories.
“Yensie Walton” is a story of great power, by a new author. It aims to show that God uses a stern discipline to form the noblest characters, and that the greatest trials of life often prove the greatest blessings. The story is subordinate to this moral aim, and the earnestness of the author breaks out into occasional preaching. But the story is full of striking incident and scenes of great pathos, with occasional gleams of humor and fun by way of relief to the more tragic parts of the narrative. The characters are strongly drawn, and, in general, are thoroughly human, not gifted with impossible perfections, but having those infirmities of the flesh which make us all akin.