The Girl Irons St. Agneta's. By J. H. Yoxall, M.P.
(Ralph Holland and Co. 3s. 6d.)—The humour and sentiment of Mr. Yoxall's lively story of The Girl from St. Agneta's fluctuate between farce and comedy. On the whole, however, the book is comedy, very vivacious, good-natured, wholesome, and human. St. Agneta's is a training college for elementary-schoolmistresses. The Rev. Godfrey Gore is the bachelor Principal, aged thirty- seven. Margaret Vine, called "Madcap," is the Principal's favourite pupil. On the Sunday before the Christmas holidays, in a sermon on renunciation, Mr. Gore warns the girls against allowing themselves to fall in love and get engaged to be married in the course of the holidays, dwelling forcibly on the implicit understanding by which they are bound in honour to do at least one year's teaching before they turn away to matrimony. But everybody understands that every girl in the school may marry whom she will and when she will, except Madcap alone. Six months later, when Madcap leaves St. Agneta's, the Principal hunts her up in the provincial town where her father is a "vet.," proposes, and is refused. A series of moving incidents follow, and a variety of entertaining characters are pressed in to develop the story,—the good fellow and decent fool," Sir Wilton Walton, squire of Walton Studley; the vicar of Walton Studley, amiable and henpecked; Mrs. Chetwyndham, dragoness of the parish ; Alothea, their flighty daughter, who sighs for an "elemental man" to fall in love with, thinks she has found him in Ducamp the Socialist, and runs from home in masculine disguise ; and the village constable, who is expected to arrest Mar- garet Vine for the murder of Alethea, but cannot do it because there is no corpse forthcoming. The situations are absurd enough, but not impossible, and one is carried along, amused _ and s3 eip_sthising, to the end by the desperate earnestness of Mr. Gore in his pursuit and final capture of Margaret.
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