Otto the Knight, and other Trans - Mississippi Stories. By Octave Thanet.
(Cassell and Co.)—The art of writing short stories is carried to great perfection by our American cousins, and the volume of ten stories now before us is a ease in point. There are three hundred and forty-eight pages in it, so that the average length of each is obvious. Of these ten tales, only one can be re- garded as an incident, and not a complete story; the rest are con- centrated narratives, with local colouring, chiefly from Arkansas, and with enough characters and incident to furnish many of our more diffuse novel-writers with material for a solid three-volume work. As for the workmanship, it is really excellent; and the back- woodsmen, the Negroes, the few planters that figure in the pages, the enmities and friendships and loves, with the Arkansas dialect —perhaps more appropriately described by the term "lingo "— are blended so as to make each story a fascinating and in- structive picture. Particularly good is the delineation of the Puritan element, which again and again peeps out in the descendants of those Eastern settlers who migrated across the Mississippi. All these stories show insight into human motives, "The Loaf of Peace," which relates the history of an Arkansas quarrel, showing it perhaps most ; while " Sist' Chaney's Black Silk" records with an almost equal insight the lengths to which the Negro love of dress is carried ; and "The Plumb Idiot" divides with the one just mentioned the palm for pathos. Not, indeed, that the pathos of Octave Thanet is very moving, a great opportunity being only half-used in "The Mort- gage on Jeffy" (Jeffy is a child) ; but the spectacle of onq of those remarkably rare masculine friendships gives unusual interest to a secondary character in "The Plumb Idiot." The chief excellence, French in its origin, of Octave Thanet, the delicate, humorous, and minute, yet not too little, paint-brush of the artist, is so combined with the broader and deeper strokes of tragedy and suffering as to convince us that this volume of stories pro- vides one of the best and most picturesque introductions to Western life ever thrown into the " shert-story form."
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