The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch. By Talbot Baines Reed.
(Religious Tract Society.)—This story is reprinted from the Boys' Own Paper; and, indeed, it well deserves a more extended life. The device of making a biographer of a watch, a ring, or the like, is not new, but it is serviceable. In this case, it has been employed with ingenuity and taste. The watch begins its career in the possession of one Charlie Newcome, a lad of thirteen—who ought, by the way, to have been above the second form in the school to which be is sent. At school, of coarse, the "idle apprentice" turns up, and comes to grief. Indeed, he appears at intervals throughout the book, till we have him at last a reformed character. In due time the watch, though not in the same ownership (this is no small convenience attaching to this particular machinery of fiction) proceeds to the University. Its new owner will afford the boy of the period a timely lesson against over-work, when he reads what befell George Reader, after he had been placed first in the First Class of the Classical Tripes. The watch then passes to an old school acquaintance, a judicious admixture of the athlete and the scholar, and from him, through the hands of a young Irish soldier, to its original owner. We can recommend this story with much confidence. It is well con- trived, well written, free from affectation, and altogether wholesome in tone.
Previous page
