water," which ho accidentally came across, and which ho has
only polished. His estimate is exaggerated, under any view, and if the story be merely a worked-up biography it is a somewhat dull one. If, however, it is in any material degree a fiction, Captain Mayne Reid can do something he has never yet done, write a story very improbable, yet leaving in every page the impression that it is related from memory, not created by the imagination. One reads on and on without much inte- rest, yet with a curious impression of reading the life of a man who actually went through tho somewhat tiresome adventures of the Rolling Stone. Plot there is scarcely any, any more than there is in real life, and the incidents, wild as many of them are, are interspersed with just sufficient of the common-place to be as tiresome as a yarn of the kind based by a romancing sailor on his own adventures would be. We pre- fer Captain Reid in Mexico, but if this be wholly a fiction, it is the most artistic thing he has done.
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