the incident, the phrase, the gesture, the feature of the landscape
which make you exclaim with a start, "Why, I'm seeing and hearing all
this!" It is such a book as an historian of the modern school would
delight in, more engrossing than fiction of the most realistic type.
There is incident in it too--as of the degenerate KUROLYESSOFF, a
cousin-in-law of MIHAILOVITCH, who used to flog his serfs, sometimes
to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening
pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern
Orenburg into the adjoining province of Ufa, and the building of the
mill and the dam, are astonishingly vivid and agreeable.

* * * * *

_A Maid o' Dorset_ (CASSELL) can be recommended to anyone in need of
light refreshment after a course of sterner literature. Here we are
back again in the world of small things; but if "M.E. FRANCIS'S" theme
is trivial there is no denying the art with which she handles it.
Just a quartette of characters occupies her rural stage--an old
grandmother, wise with the wisdom of years, her granddaughter, a
middle-aged farmer and a young gipsy "dairy-chap." To the horror of
her relations the Maid o' Dorset conceives an infatuation for the
gipsy, a clever rogue but no match for the grandmother. I have met
a good many farmers in my time, but never one so simple-minded as
_Solomon Blanchard_. It is all very Franciscan, and seems easy enough,
but if you think, for that reason, that you could do it yourself, you
couldn't. Its charm lies in its fragrance, and that is a quality which
is not lightly come by.

* * * * *