Take it all in all, “Horseshoe Robinson” is a work which should be found on every book-shelf, not only because it is a most entertaining story, but because of the wealth of valuable information concerning the colonists which it contains. That it has been brought out once more, well illustrated, is something which will give pleasure to thousands who have long desired an opportunity to read the story again, and to the many who have tried vainly in these latter days to procure a copy that they might read it for the first time.
THE PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND. A story of the Coast of Maine. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cloth, 12mo. Illustrated. Price, $1.00.
Written prior to 1862, the “Pearl of Orr’s Island” is ever new; a book filled with delicate fancies, such as seemingly array themselves anew each time one reads them. One sees the “sea like an unbroken mirror all around the pine-girt, lonely shores of Orr’s Island,” and straightway comes “the heavy, hollow moan of the surf on the beach, like the wild angry howl of some savage animal.”
Who can read of the beginning of that sweet life, named Mara, which came into this world under the very shadow of the Death angel’s wings, without having an intense desire to know how the premature bud blossomed? Again and again one lingers over the descriptions of the character of that baby boy Moses, who came through the tempest, amid the angry billows, pillowed on his dead mother’s breast.
There is no more faithful portrayal of New England life than that which Mrs. Stowe gives in “The Pearl of Orr’s Island.”
BURT’S SERIES of STANDARD FICTION.
THE SPIRIT OF THE BORDER. A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley. By Zane Grey. Cloth, 12mo. with four illustrations by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00.
A book rather out of the ordinary is this “Spirit of the Border.” The main thread of the story has to do with the work of the Moravian missionaries in the Ohio Valley. Incidentally the reader is given details of the frontier life of those hardy pioneers who broke the wilderness for the planting of this great nation. Chief among these, as a matter of course, is Lewis Wetzel, one of the most peculiar, and at the same time the most admirable of all the brave men who spent their lives battling with the savage foe, that others might dwell in comparative security.
Details of the establishment and destruction of the Moravian “Village of Peace” are given at some length, and with minute description. The efforts to Christianize the Indians are described as they never have been before, and the author has depicted the characters of the leaders of the several Indian tribes with great care, which of itself will be of interest to the student.