CURRENT LITERATURE.
GIFT-BOOKS.
Sunday. (Wells Gardner, Darton, and Co.)—This is a volume which certainly discharges very satisfactorily its function of supplying " Sunday reading for the young." " Sunday reading," we are glad to see, is a term interpreted with a reasonable lati- tude. It does not exclude fiction, for instance ; but, to judge from the two serial stories which run through the volume,—" Captain Geoff," by Ismay Thorn, and " Gaffer Misery," by Mrs. E. M. Pield,—the fiction is instructive as well as entertaining. The first is a tale of school-life, always a risky undertaking for a lady, indeed for any one, so difficult is it not to idealise; the other, a story of the French Revolution, with the scene laid in Britanny. " Little Builders " is the title of some papers on natural history. The beaver, of course, figures among them, and the bee, as do also various birds ; but the crab (the land-crab) and the stickleback will probably be new to some readers in this capacity. The papers, generally, present an agreeable variety. The illustrations are sometimes good ; but some of the larger drawings—as that of the little Count and his valet on p. 8—cannot be so described.— We may commend at the same time The Dawn of Day, 1890 (S.P.C.K.) a "Monthly Illustrated Magazine for School and Parish Use," a volume that furnishes a plentiful supply of interesting and wholesome reading.
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