FICTION
A MIXED BAG
Ix Green Sandals Mr. Lowis has adopted the Wilkie Collins plan of telling the story of a mystery from the points of view of the different characters concerned in it. Mr. Lowis differs from the ordinary writer of detective stories too in that his characters really are characters. Honoria, the woman whose charm is in process of being extinguished by the wet blanket of a dismally unsuccessful husband, Venne the man of action, Staynes the man of intellectual perceptiveness and weak loyalties—all these and the small Burmese trading centre which is their setting Mr. Lowis has drawn with accurate fidelity. Indeed, they are drawn far too well for the plot. For; the truth of the matter is, we cannot care very much whether Honoria's husband, a bankrupt trader in cotton piece- goods, was murdered or not. Unlike Mr. Staynes, we know from the beginning that Honoria was incapable of committing the crime. It would have been a more exciting story had we been shown Honoria from the point of view of one of the gossips of the club at Mingin, instead of from her own. Mr. Lowis is ingenious and writes well ; but, for a story of this kind, he has laid too many of his cards on the table.
Samuel Drummond comes to us from America, and it, too, is a well-written story with real people in it. The scene is Ohio in the middle of the last century, and the struggle of the Civil War varies the farmer-hero's unceasing struggle with nature. Mr. Boyd has a poet's feeling for the beauty of land- scape, and a sympathetic sense of comedy when he describes the quaint and kindly people who inhabit it.
There is little comedy in The. Pool. Its virtue is that its author has attempted to depict the squalor of slum life without any touch of false gentleness or prettiness. Long conversations in Cockney dialect fill the greater part of the book. The speech is lively and accurate and almost unendurably ugly ; it is when we consider the character of the heroine Rosie that we
are doubtful. Seduced, when-drunk; by a youth whom she has nick-named Boss-Eye, she ,plans a terrible revenge. Her crippled child shall live to slay his father. She anticipates this satisfying event, however, by placing bottles of beer in her seducer's way and watching their effect on him. When the eleventh bottle has slipped from his hand and he has tried to grasp the twelfth bottle and tried in vain, it occurs to Rosie that the man is unworthy of her vengeance. So she ties two flat-irons to the waist of her half- imbecile baby and drops it into the Thames. After this she marries- Bert, who is devoted to her in spite of his know+ ledge of these events.
. King Heart is a romance of Scotland before the disaster of Flodden Field. Miss Oman has something of Maurice Hewlett's gift for creating a richly coloured and sensuous world, like the world of the Border Ballads. Readers will rejoice in it who like a hero to wear a gown of white damask flowered with gold, tunic and jacket of cloth of gold, hose of scarlet, and to carry a striped carnation in his hand.
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