Bedesman 4. By M. H. Skrine. (Duckworth and Co. 2s.
6d. net.)—We should have thought it impossible to add to the crowd of school stories one of original design. Yet such a one has just made its appearance in the " Roadmender" Library. It bas come, too, clothed in a delightful dress of almost perfect English prose. Of course, Mrs. Shrine's little tale is all as improbable as can be, for- Oxford dons seldom indulge in sisters who are housemaids. But it is lifted above its fellows for this reason, that the world of which it treats is not limited by the narrow hounds of a schoolboy's outlook, but is the world of which school and university form only a part, where a man's destiny is helped or hindered, never made, by them ; and because it presents with true insight the struggle between the peasant and the scholar in the person of David Bold, the choice which most be made between altruism and the development of oneself, the contrasts and difficulties of a boy's life in a social state to which he was not born. But it does not follow from this that there is in the book any quality of elemental passion. It is the tenderest, palest idyll, caught up for a moment and delicately fixed, with its cameo portraits of David and his lady-love, and, most charming of all, of his mother.
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