The significant merit of this story is the mystical creation of a man's experience with death. The things of earth and heaven become perplexingly intermingled. Realism becomes strongly blended with the thoughts that move in weird circles on the tenuous wings of wanton fancy, and we live a puzzled moment as we try to visualize the man's experiences in his new realm of consciousness with its 'incredible freedom and joy.' The whole narrative is wrought in the delicate tracery of one whose temperament is obviously the temperament of a poet.
LITTLE BROTHER
Madeleine Z. Doty, of New York, learned the true story of 'Little Brother' when at The Hague, in the summer of 1915, as a delegate to the Woman's International Congress. Miss Doty is a lawyer by profession; by practice, a writer, investigator, and traveler.
With terrible concreteness Little Brother weights our soul-sense with the horror and tragedy of war. The story is told with a bared realism which the poignancy of the occasion freely extenuates. In short crisp sentences the opening scene is exposed. There follow in dizzy succession and in the same quick-breathing style the little tragic ordeals that fill the story with a terrible passion. It penetrates the very essence of our being and starkly confronts us with the bleak mystery of the existing condition of world-carnage—a carnage that wantonly wreaks its unselected vengeance on little sufferers unskilled and unschooled in squaring their strength to ill-proportioned trials.
WHAT ROAD GOETH HE?
'F. J. Louriet' is a pseudonym representing the dual authorship of Captain and Mrs. F. J. Green, long of Australia and now of Honolulu.
By the free but not too lavish use of sea terms and common sailor talk, we are brought into immediate and intimate knowledge of the affairs of a ship floundering in a storm. Through graphic sensory images, with their vivid and varied appeals, the whole perilous situation is wonderfully intensified. Seldom indeed are details better massed to secure an intended effect. But the interest later comes to centre in the great theme of sacrifice—a sacrifice all the more significant because it is performed with such absolute spontaneity. The story is a noteworthy example of strong effect secured with great economy of time and material.