Allowing for these slight defects, That Girl from Texas is a well-told story, and, like the preceding, His Way and Her Will, is a healthy book. There is nothing in either to shock even the sense of propriety, let alone morals, and both give evidence of a talent for story-telling that if properly cultivated will make the fair authors famous.
Some years since Théophile Gautier published a strange story of transformation in which the soul of the lover was passed to the body of a husband, and the inner life of the husband transferred to the body of the lover. Morbidly-inclined readers are referred to this ingenious but disgusting work for entertainment. The author of The Princess Daphne, too modest to put his or her name upon the title-page (Belford, Clarke & Co.), to accommodate morbid readers unacquainted with French, has translated Gautier's plot and adapted it to American taste by making the transferee female instead of the coarser sex. "Whether it was worth while to go through so much for so little," as Sam Weller's school-boy remarked when he got done with the alphabet, "is a matter of taste." We think, in the case of The Princess Daphne, that it was not.
THE QUEEN OF THE BLOCK.
By Alexander L. Kinkead.
CHAPTER I.
THE QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY BALL.
Bill Kellar played the first fiddle and called the figures; Blind Benner was second fiddle, and Hunch Blair blew the cornet. A curious trio they were.
William Kellar had come from an Eastern city, where he had been the leader of a successful orchestra. The noises of the streets had proved too much for his sensitive hearing, and he had fled from them to the stillness of the forest. He lived at the foot of Coot Hill, where he was frequently visited by Blind Benner, a young man to whom he had taken a fancy and whom he taught to play on the violin.
Blind Benner had a Christian name, but the people of Three-Sisters did not know what it was, and they always spoke of him by the title his infirmity suggested.