17 NOVEMBER 1888, Page 41

St. Helen's Weil. By Mary H. Debenham. (National Society.) —This

is a story of Jacobite times. The heroine's father is an English adherent of the Young Pretender, and has to fly for his life. She lives for some years in an out-of-the-way Welsh village with her sister and an old nurse, and, the sister becoming danger- ously ill, conceives the idea of fetching the water from a wishing- well, water which is sure, according to popular belief, to cure a sufferer. How she goes on this journey, how she fares, and what comes of it in the end, are well told in this book. The style might with advantage have been suited a little to the time and circum- stances of the supposed writer.