The Company's Servant. By B. M. Croker. (Hurst and Blacked.
6s.)—This is an admirable story of life in India as it is lived by English people who are not Civil servants, or soldiers, or planters, or merchants, and by the Eurasian population who have more or less to do with them. John Vernon is a well-born young Englishman who has. quarrelled with his father, and has taken up the work of a guard on one of the Indian railways. His head- quarters are at a place which answers more or less to Swindon, or Crewe, or Derby in our own railway system, and here it is that the adventures, curiously mingling his old life and his new, come to him. The only criticism on the narrative is this : Could so capable, so intelligent, so resourceful a young man have ever been the dunce which be represents himself to have been, and which, indeed, he must have been to bring about the initial situation ? Still, we are told that neither Clive nor Wellington could have passed the examinations which now bar or narrow the way into the Army.
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