In the arid life of the book-reviewer there is sometimes found the oasis of opportunity to recommend to a (comparatively) less suffering community a book worth reading. My Baronite has by chance come upon such an one in Timothy's Quest, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. The little volume is apparently an importation, having been printed for the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. It is published in London by Gay and Bird, a firm whose name, though it sounds lively, is as unfamiliar as the Author's. Probably from this combination of circumstances, Timothy's Quest has, as far as my Baronite's quest goes, escaped the notice of the English Reviewer. That is his personal loss. The book is an almost perfect idyl, full of humanity, fragrant with the smell of flowers, and the manifold scent of meadows. It tells how Timothy, waif and stray in the heart of a great city, escaped from a baby-farm to whose tender cares he had been committed; how, in a clothes-basket, mounted on four wooden wheels, cushioned with a dingy shawl, he wheeled off another waif and stray, a prattling infant; and how, accompanied by a mongrel dog named Rags, the party made its way to a distant village, nestling in the lap of green hills with a real river running through it. Here boy and baby—and Rags too—find New England friends, whom it is a privilege for nous autres to know. Samanthy Ann is a real live person, and so is Jabe Slocum—a long, loose, knock-kneed, slack-twisted person, of whom Aunt Hitty Tarbox (whom George Eliot might have sketched) remarked he would have been "longer yit if he hedn't hed so much turned up fur feet." Timothy's Quest is the best thing of the kind that has reached us from America since Little Lord Fauntleroy crossed the Atlantic.
(Signed) "Nihil obstat," Baron de B.-W.
Synonym for a Chemise de Nuit.—"A Nap-sack."
Q. E. D.
"Sorry I've no better Quarters to invite you all to, Mrs. Quiverfull!
"Ah, you should Marry, Captain Sparks! If you'd got a Better Half, you'd have better Quarters too!"