2 DECEMBER 1893, Page 11

Raff's Ranch. By 1'. M. Holmes. (Blackie and Son.)—Tom Dacre's

adventures in the Wild West present a very truthful picture of cowboy life in the least settled parts of the prairie country. There is plenty of fighting, and Tom has to use his" shoot- ing-iron " in grim earnest on several occasions. The dialogue and slang of the cowboys is hit oft with great vigour, and we get a really trustworthy picture of a Montana or Dakota life, but the youthful reader must not think that this is the average experience of a cowboy, at any rate, a cowboy north of the Boundary, though it probably gives a tolerably close description of ranch-life in the worst of the South-Western States,—Texas, for example.