26 NOVEMBER 1892, Page 27

A Pair of Old Shoes. By Christabel Coleridge. (Wells, Gardner,

Darton, and Co.)—Miss Coleridge builds a most ingenious little story on the fact that in a blocked-up room in a country rectory a pair of shoes, apparently a hundred years old, covered with "the mud of the country," were found. It is quite a triumph of the constructive art. Slight as the tale necessarily is, it can hardly fail to increase the author's already high reputation. Melissa Hay's love-story is brought to a happy termination by a surprise which, we venture to think, no reader will have an- ticipated.