task a hopeless one. That he should have succeeded even in
making a fairly readable book out of this material would have
been remarkable, and it is a pronounced artistic triumph that
the book should prove of such absorbing interest. For
absorbingly interesting it is, to any reader who is willing
that a novel should provide something more than entertainment;
and who is not afraid of a work of fiction that compels him to
think as he reads. The principal character is a man descended
from a line of ancestors whose lives have been wild and lawless,
and who have wallowed in almost every form of brutality and vice.
The four preceding generations of the race are depicted for us
in a series of brief but masterly characterizations, in which
every stroke tells, and we witness the gradual weakening of the
family stock. But with the generation just preceding the main
action of the novel, there has been introduced a vigorous strain
of peasant blood, and the process of regeneration has begun.
It is this process that goes on before our eyes. It does not
become a completed process, but the prospect is bright for the
future, and the flags that fly over town and harbor in the closing
chapter have a symbolical significance, for they announce a victory
of spirit over sense, not only in the cases of certain among the
individual participants in the action, but also in the case of
the whole community to which they belong. So much for the book
as a study in heredity. As an educational tract, it has the
conspicuous virtue of remaining in close touch with life while
embodying the spirit of modern scientific pedagogy. The hero
of the book,--the last descendant of a race struggling for
moral and physical rehabilitation,--throws himself into the
work of education with an energy equal to that which his
forbears had turned into various perverse channels. He