14 JANUARY 1905, Page 21

• The Edge of Circumstance: a Story of the Sea.

By Edward Noble. London: w. • Blackwood add Soar. Lthid

realises that the action takes place under the Union Jack, not under the Stars and Stripes. Through the medium of an excep- tionally readable novel, Mr. Ralph Connor gives a most interest- ing account of a side of Canadian life which is more unfamiliar than it ought to be to English readers. It is difficult for the Mother-country to realise that a set of devoted men, belonging apparently to the Presbyterian Church, go out to preach the Gospel in the lonely places of the far West of the Dominion, as the prophets of old went out into their deserts. The contrast of the culture of the East of Canada, with its great towns and Univer- sities, with tho lonely life of prospectors in the West, is only alluded to by inference in this book as something too familiar to be striking. English pebple will, however, find that they get many new views on the daughter-nation in reading this story, which, as indicated above, has the great advantage of being interesting as a novel as well as valuable as a picture of Canadian life.