19 NOVEMBER 1887, Page 46

The War of the Axe, by J. Peray.Groves (Blackie and

Son), is a sufficiently lively but rather loosely constructed story of adventures in South Africa at the time of the Kaffir War. There is a delightful number of improbabilities, such as the discovery by Tom Flinders, the boy-hero, of a friend of his father in a forlorn castaway, and the self-poisoning of the captors of Tom and his friend by means of a bottle of chloroform. But the story flows readily from the writer's pen, and it is very much above the average of fiction of the kind.