Peregrine in Love (Hodder and Stoughton) is a story whose sentimental title does it considerably less than justice. It gives no indication of what is really an admirably vivacious comedy of courtship and intrigue, with a colonial setting that is engagingly novel. Miss C. Fox Smith seems to know Victoria and the island of Vancouver with the intimacy of long affection; her pen-pictures and her idiom are both of them convincingly genuine. The result for the reader is a twofold interest, half in seeing what will be to most an unfamiliar place under expert guidance, half in the briskly moving intrigue supposed to be going on there. I say "supposed," because, to be frank, Miss Fox Smith's story, good fun as it is, hardly convinces like her setting. You may, for example, feel that you have met before in fiction the lonely hero who rescues the solitary maiden, his shipmate, from undesirable society, and falls in love with her, only to learn that she is voyaging to meet her betrothed. At this point I suppose most novel-readers would have given fairly long odds against the betrothed in question keeping the appointment, and I may add that they would have won their money. Not that Peregrine was going to find the course of his love run smooth in spite of this; being a hero and a gentleman he had for one thing to try, and keep on trying, to bring the affianced pair together, and thus provide the tale with another than its clearly predestined end. Of course he doesn't succeed, but the attempt furnishes capital entertainment for everybody concerned, and proves that Mr. Punch's "C.F.S." can write prose too.
The title of Gold Must be Tried by Fire (Macmillan) might be called axiomatic for the precise type of fiction represented by the story. Because, if gold hadn't to be tried by fire, you might obviously marry the hero and heroine on the first page and save everybody much trouble and expense. Mr. Richard Aumerle Maher, however, knows his job better than that. True, he marries his heroine early, but to the wrong man, the Labour leader and crook, Will Lewis, who vanishes just before the entrance of the strong but unsilent hero, only to reappear (under an alias) in time to get shot in a strike riot. Mr. Maher's book comes, as you may already have guessed, from that great country where they have replaced alcohol by sugar, and where (perhaps in consequence) heroines of such super-sentimentality as Daidie Grattan have no terrors for them. Personally I found her and her exploits on burning ships, besieged mills and the like a trifle sticky. For the rest you have some interesting details of the workings of the paper industry; a style that to the unfamiliar eye is at times startling (as when, on page 282, the hero's head "snapped erect"); and lots and lots of love. As for the ending, to relieve any apprehensions on your part, let me quote it. "Taking her swiftly in his arms, he questioned: 'Has the gold come free from the fire at last, my darling?' 'Gold or dross,' she whispered as she yielded, 'it is your own.'" Ah!
Love's Triumph (Methuen) is concerned to a great extent with the development of a raw Kentucky lad into an attractive and resourceful man; but its chief interest lies rather with his trainer. When Victor McCalloway arrived in Kentucky and took Boone Wellver under his wing it became obvious enough that he was bent on reconstructing his own life as well as moulding Boone's. McCalloway, when the seal of his past is broken, turns out to be Sir Hector Dinwiddie, D.S.O., K.C.B., a tradesman's son who was generally believed to have killed himself in Paris. I must assume that Mr. Charles Neville Buck intended us to recognise in Sir Hector a certain General whose name acquired a painful notoriety not so long ago. The reader may form what opinion he likes of the good taste of all this, but there can be no question that the author has drawn a fine character. At the outset his style is so jumpy that the story is difficult to follow, but presently its course grows clearer and I fancy that you will follow it keenly, as I did, to the end.
WORRIES OF THE DARK AGES.
Peaceful Knight (who has called to ask his way at a strange castle). "Oh, confound it! I wish I'd read the notice before I blew the horn. I don't feel a bit like fighting giants to-day, and besides I promised to be home early for dinner."