equally well suited for children of six feet and upwards. The author
is personally familiar with the scenes he describes, and is thus able
to give them a verisimilitude which in other circumstances can be
attained only by the rarest genius; and notwithstanding the
associations, of his last book, the _Scalp-hunters_, there is only one
bloody conflict in the present one fought by animals of the genus
Homo.

The local habitation of the lost family is a nook in the Great
American Desert--a nook in a desert twenty-five times the size of
England! But this wilderness of about a million square miles is not
all sand or all barren earth: it contains numerous other features of
interest besides mountains and oases; it includes the country of New
Mexico, with its towns and cities; the country round the Great Salt
and Utah Lakes, where the germ of a Mormon nation is expanding on all
sides; and it is traversed in its whole breadth by the Rocky
Mountains. An English family, after being ruined in St Louis, and
reduced to their last hundred pounds, are persuaded by a Scottish
miner to accompany him across this desert to New Mexico. 'They are a
wonderful people,' says the story-teller, 'these same Scotch. They are
but a small nation, yet their influence is felt everywhere upon the
globe. Go where you will, you will find them in positions of trust and
importance--always prospering, yet, in the midst of prosperity, still
remembering, with strong feelings of attachment, the land of their
birth. They manage the marts of London, the commerce of India, the
fur-trade of America, and the mines of Mexico. Over all the American
wilderness you will meet them, side by side with the backwoods-pioneer
himself, and even pushing him from his own ground. From the Gulf of
Mexico to the Arctic Sea, they have impressed with their Gaelic names
rock, river, and mountain; and many an Indian tribe owns a Scotchman