This is a genial and breezy account of how two young English ladies went out to Canada and joined their brother, who, with another young Englishman, had taken up a grant of land in the North-West and was trying to convert it into a farm. The story is ‘told like a novel,’ but it is obviously founded very closely on facts, and is realistic in the best sense of the word—a piece of actual everyday life. The sisters do not fall in love with their brother’s partner, and the young men do not display any heroic capacity for triumphing over difficulties. On the contrary, they are rather an ordinary pair of amiable inefficient people, and they fare accordingly. What happens is consequently very much more amusing than if the book had been constructed to point a moral, while there is plenty to be learned from it by those who choose to read between the lines.
AN ENGLISH STUDENT’S
WANDER-YEAR IN AMERICA.
By A. G. BOWDEN-SMITH.
One Volume. Crown 8vo., cloth. 5s. net.
The author of this book has made a study of an aspect of American life which will be novel to most English readers. She was fortunate enough to be able to visit representative specimens of every variety of higher educational centre—and in America there are many varieties. Being fresh from the life of Newnham College, she was peculiarly alert to note the points in which they resembled and differed from the corresponding institutions in England; and she has traced with remarkable shrewdness the resulting effects, not only in respect to education in the narrower sense, but on individual character, and in the form of influences, subtle and far-reaching, on social development. She had the advantage of meeting the students on an equal footing, and so gained many opportunities of seeing things as they are which an ‘educational expert’ of higher standing and authority could not have enjoyed. But Miss Bowden Smith is herself an educational expert in a very real sense, and readers of her comprehensive and sympathetic survey will feel that they have gained a quite new insight into the character of the American people.
THE CLERGY AND SOCIAL
SERVICE.
Cambridge Lectures on Pastoral Theology.
By the Very Rev. W. MOORE EDE, D.D.,