Stella's Story. By Dailey Dale. (J. S. Virtue and Co.)—This
is a dainty little volume, well printed and well illustrated, and gives a very pretty, if also sweetly commonplace, story of Venice and England. Three people meet in the city of gondolas ; or, to be strictly accurate, Paul Benson meets Miss Ruth Seaton, an amateur artist of some power and more ambition, and her niece, Stella Graham, whose beauty was of the type that Raphael would have painted and that Rubens would not look twice at. " Strength was Paul Benson's distinguishing quality, precision Miss Seaton's, purity Stella Graham's." Paul and Stella fall in love with each other, but, as it is absolutely necessary that the course of true love should not run smooth, she loses a ring, and he goes to England to marry Mary Fenwick, out of respect—and charity. But Paul is an owner of mines, and Mary is killed through an explosion in one of these. So he drifts back to Venice and Stella, and is not a widower over long. The story contains some excellent portraits of curates and young girls to match, and is sufficiently agreeable reading. Its sweetness, however, as has been already hinted, is somewhat cloying and too suggestive of literary toffy.
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