The Princess Willa. By Mrs. Herbert Martin. (W. P. Nimmo,
Edinburgh.)—This is a very bright, original, and wholesome story—the story of a little Austrian Princess who at the ago of twelve is brought by her father to Macaulay House, Chelsea, a "high-class finishing school for young ladies," kept by a Mrs. Tarleton. There she not only receives her education, but con- tracts a life-long friendship with Ruth Cartwright, a pupil-teacher, and the daughter of " a manufacturing wholesale chemist of scientific turn, a cultivated and clever man, who might have been rich by this time if he had not loved science much more than money-making." The book is, indeed, a very clever representa- tion of the entertainments, loves, jealousies, and meannesses which are the features of such an establishment as that of Mrs. Tarleton, who has her own skeleton in the closet in the person of a bibulous and disreputable husband. Poverty descends, or seems to descend, on the bright, loveable, simple-minded Princess, and tests the quality of her friends. The moat loyal is, as may readily be con- jectured, the comparatively poor and unaristocratic Ruth. Of course all ends well. Ottilia's father returns to her, and brings with him a princely and in every way worthy lover ; and they carry her off. We have even at the end a vision of Ruth in a new position, that of Ottilia's step-mother. There is far more " grit " and far less missishness in this story than are generally to be found in books written for girls.
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