Camp and Cantonment. By Mrs. Leopold Paget. (Longman and Co.)
—This lady is the wife of an artillery officer, who accompanied her hus- band to India in 1857, and spent two years in that country. She has produced a pleasant volume of travels of the old sort, in which the reader is expected to sympathize with all the author's sufferings from bad food, or want of food, or bad conveyances, or bad lodging, as well as her anxieties about her husband, and child, and friends, and the mutineers, and everything else. However, she is never querulous even for a moment, and has a real love for natural scenery which is even attractive. Her great panacea for India appears to be the confiscation of the property of all the Hindoo temples and a better observance of the Sabbath, of which the first perhaps is hardly just, and the second hardly practicable. Major Paget adds a short account of the part he took in the pursuit of Tantia Tepee, written in a straightforward and soldierly way. Mrs. Paget's book will probably be popular with her sex, who will get from it a tolerably lively idea of the domestic difficulties of a soldier's wife in India. If, however, we may obtrude advice, we should strongly recommend the ruthless excision of the narrative of the voyages to and from India, which are bad specimens of a bad thing.
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