FICTION.
MR. RUBY JUMPS THE TRACES.*
Ix one of the most characteristic of the " Bab Ballads " the late Sir William Gilbert describes how a man who had lived a perfectly blameless life until reaching the confines of middle ago determined to indemnify himself for his restraint, arguing with great plausibility that the accumulated arrears of bottled-up villainy could only bo dis- charged by a colonel act of fraud. NVe are reminded of this male by the case of Mr. Ruby, but the resemblance is only partial, for if Mr. Bullock's hero did "jump the traces," it was at worst a very mild little leap. Up to the ago of forty-nine he had been a model of conscientious industry. He earned L200 a year as a clerk in the City ; he lived decently and comfortably in the suburbs with his wife and four children ; he owed no man any money. It was not exactly a Sabine farm, but there were many alleviations. His wife was devoted and capable, and though his schoolboy eon was idle and the eldest daughter a selfish minx, still the domestic friction was limited. There were no elements of tragic explosion. And then one fine spring day the dimon du midi—the spirit of rebellion and unrest that sometimes possesses a man in the prime of life—sud- denly possessed Mr. Ruby to leave his home and BOO life. Mr. Ruby's deviation from his orbit was tangential, but it did not lest long and it did not break up his happy home. Moreover, wo have to thank Mr. Bullock for declining to do-decorate the recital by the record of any squalid amours, after the fashion of our modern ROuSsORu3. But the plain fact is that Mr. Shan Bullock has boon handicapped by his conscientiousness and consistency. Mr. Ru'ey excites a certain mild compassion by his brief but ineffectual effort to break the bonds of routine, but he is impossible as a hero of romance. Our sympathies are more securely enlisted on the side of bits wife and his daughter Nally. If he had drudged faithfully in the City, they had shown an even greater devotion to domestic duty. Mrs. Ruby harboured some unfounded suspicions, but she had considerable provocation. Tho pictures of suburban life are well done, but they have neither the sombre gloom with which George Giseing know how to invest it, nor the engaging absurdity shown by Mr. Barry Pain and the author of The Diary of a Nobody in dealing with similar themes.
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