Evening Standard—"We have never laughed more often."
Canada—"A whole storehouse of sunshine. Of the same brand as 'Literary Lapses' and 'Nonsense Novels.' It is the surest recipe for enjoying a happy holiday."
Daily Telegraph—"Irresistibly comical. Mr. Leacock strikes us as a sort of Americanised W. W. Jacobs. Like the English humorist, the Canadian one has a delightfully fresh and amusing way of putting things."
Times—"His real hard work—for which no conceivable emolument would be a fitting reward—is distilling sunshine. This new book is full of it—the sunshine of humour, the thin keen sunshine of irony, the mellow evening sunshine of sentiment."
BY W. J. LOCKE.
STELLA MARIS. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6/-
With 8 Illustrations by Frank Wiles.
⁂ Mr. Locke's astonishing fertility of invention has never yet been seen to as great advantage as in this story. It has all the picturesque bravery of the "Beloved Vagabond," all the tender sentiment of "Marcus Ordeyne," all the quixotic spirit of "Clementina Wing." And yet it is like none of these. Infinitely tender, infinitely impressive, is the story of Stella Maris, the wonder child, who has never moved from her couch, who receives her impressions of the outside world from her gentle spirit and the gold-clad tales of her loving friends and the secrets of the seagulls that flit so near her window. And then Stella, grown to a woman, recovers; to take her place, not in the world of beauty she had pictured from the stillness of her couch, but the world of men and women.
From the first page the reader falls under a spell. For all its wistful delicacy of texture Mr. Locke's humanity, broad and strong, vibrates with terror just as it soothes with its sense of peace. This is Mr. Locke's finest achievement.