SHORTER NOTICES.
COUNTRY CONVERSATIONS. (John Murray. 3s. 6d. net.) This most amusing little book is far too good for one to believe the publisher's statement that the conversations were taken down from life : the nameless editor of the 'eighties has shown a quite unnecessary modesty ! It is in the very best tradition of pastoral, a Bucolic to rival Theocritus had it the lyricism : even the most obvious jokes told with a delicate quaint seriousness that gives them, as it were, their final form : quotable from every page, but generally at its lightest on the subject of Death :- "Miss G..: I hear that you lost your wife ten years ago. You must have led a sad, lonely life since her death. David E.: Quite the other way, ma'am. I'd never no peace at all till she went. I prayed to the. Lord night and day for thirty years that He would please to part us ; but I left it to Him which way it should be. I was quite ready to go myself ; but He took her at last, and right thankful I was indeed."
Or, again, this :- " John's mother is dead at last, but she lay a long while ; you know sick folks canna go hoff unless they're kept nice and dean ; I'll be bound her'd have died a deal sooner if I'd had the tending of her, because I should always have been settling and washing of her. For all her'd been so wicked, her died like a good 'un, and said her was going to Glory."
Previous page
