Robbery under Arms. By Rolf Bolderswood. 3 vols. (Remington and
Co.)—This " Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia," as the sub-title describes it, is one of the most vivid pictures of an adventurous life that has ever come under our observation. The hero tells his own story. When he first introduces himself to us, he is looking forward to being hanged in the course of a month ; and to ease his conscience or to distract his thoughts, for both motives are present in his mind, he relates the adventures through which he and his associates in a gang of bushrangers have passed. As a matter of fact, he is not hanged, but has his sentence commuted to fifteen years of penal servitude, these fifteen being finally diminished to twelve. The twelve over, he marries the woman whom he had loved all the time, and who remains faithful to him ; and so he makes a new start. Perhaps it would have been better to have let him be hanged, even at the risk of harrowing the feelings of sympathetic readers. The fact is that the book is too fascinating. We can quite imagine that an adventurous lad might think that twelve years of prison, gloomy as they might be, would not be too high a price to pay for the years, almost as numerous, of stirring adventure which the hero enjoys before justice lays hands on him. Nothing less than the gallows would point an adequate moral for a tale that has been adorned in so attractive a fashion. Robbery under Arms might very well do for future generations of English-speaking youth what " The Adventures of Jack Sheppard" are said to have done for the past. In fact, so large is the field of action, so splendid the prizes, so stirring the risks, and so great the admixture of really high qualities in the actors with their evil deeds, that it might do more. Putting aside this consideration, we have nothing but praise for this story. Of adventure of the most stirring kind, there is, as we have said, abundance. But there is more than this. The characters are drawn with great skill. Every one of the gang of bushrangers is strongly individualised. We have not the mere catalogue of fortis Gyas fortisque Cloanthus, but genuine men. The father, a sturdy Englishman whose whole nature has been warped by early influences ; the hero, poor "Jim," his brother, a simple, loveable fellow who might have gone straight under happier circumstances ; Starlight, a gentleman by birth and education, who has a strange story behind him in the Old Country ; and, lastly, the half-breed Warrigai, are all admirable figures. This is a book of no common literary force.
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