In a North Country Village. By M. E. Francis. (Osgood,
McIlvaine, and Co.) —" Within eight miles of one of our largest Northern manufacturing towns on the main road, between it and a fashionable watering-place, there is a certain sleepy little hamlet that I know of which has remained unchanged to all in- tents and purposes for several hundred years, and the inhabitants of which have lived from generation to generation in undisturbed content." It is some of the characters in this sleepy little hamlet, to which the name of Thornleigh is given, that the author sets herself to sketch. She has accomplished her task with great skill, and a truly loving care which recalls the Scottish " Kailyard " school at its best. As in Mrs. Oliphant's in- comparable Carlingforcl, the centre of life in Thornleigh is a clergyman, and Miss (or Mrs.) Francis gives us a humorous- pathetic sketch of the worthy canon who keeps everybody and everything right in Thornleigh, forces people who ought to marry to go through the necessary ceremony, and consoles—and even staggers in the company of—poor tipplers. In such chapters as " Celebrities " and "Here and There" we have some delicate thumb-nail sketches. Other stories are more ambitious. "Aunt Jinny " is a clever sketch, which happily does not end so tragically as seems likely at the beginning, of a good kindly creature who is shamefully used by relatives. " Nancy " is a more enjoyable sketch of a strong-minded, able-bodied woman who marries a lover when he is disabled by an accident, and after he has been dis. carded by the girl he would have preferred to marry. " Ga.ffer's Child" tells the somewhat conventional but always interesting story of a foundling who prefers the good folk who have adopted her to her own mother. "Our Joe," in which a son who has not done abroad what his parents and himself expected, comes home, but forbears to make himself known, strikes us as both conven- tional and artificial. But the book as a whole is an admirable one of a healthy kind. The illustrations, it should be added, are exquisite.
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