The Other Man and Myself ; or, Scenes in the
Sunny South. By Oliver Osborn. (Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.)—It is a pity that the author's description of how be and a friend left their clerk- ships in the City to try conclusions with South Africa, is not better arranged and a little freer from slang. There is plenty of good material in it, and some sound common-sense, and plenty of humour of the rough-and-ready sort. But the later chapters scarcely seem to hang together, and, indeed, we must occasionally confess ourselves in the dark as to what the hero is really doing. We hear of him in some capacity on the staff of the Mauritius Famine Relief Committee, but the rest of his ten years seem strangely indefinite ; he never seems to have settled to anything. It is not the way to eke out a scanty pittance, to indulge in black coffee and cigarettes, which these two poor clerks were apparently in the habit of doing when they made up their minds to emigrate.
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