The Sorrow Stones, By Maud E. Williams. (Longmans and Co.
6s.)—If this is, as we imagine, Miss Williams's first novel, she is to be congratulated- We took it up expecting to find the usual small-talk, voluble and striving after brilliancy, which the reviewer learns to dread from the modern novelist. We found instead English prose admirable in its restraint and variety, broad as the moors, fresh as the winds, and untroubled as the Runio Sorrow Stones themselves. The story is so simple as to be almost unnecessary, just woven of little events in the life of a country lad, who becomes "scholar of Queen's College, Oxford," and fights and dies in the Boer War; but he and Maggie, who eared for him, are most lovable folk and true ; and in this narrow space there is, after all, RS much room for those passions which are infinite as in the most complex plot. A little drama is worked into the web, a little comedy, mid a never-broken 'thread of pathos and of the sense of
sorrow—not that wearisome pathos which is usually associated with' the unconscious actions of a child, but the wider, truer suffering which must come to all men and women. And we are grateful to Miss Williams for remembering not only the men who went from chill moor and fen to the South African sun, not only the amazement of all England as the war dragged on, but the women also who knitted their inadequate garments and packed their parcels of groceries for the front in the little villages where they were left behind, each with her Sorrow Stone of Sacrifice.
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