.4 Son of the Forge. By Robert Blatchford. (A. D.
Inure and Co.)—This is a story of the realistic kind. The teller of it describes himself as having been the son of a brutal chainmaker in the Black Country. After various adventures, some of them described with no little power, he enlists, deserts, and, enlisting again, embarks for the Crimea. Scenes in barracks, on board the transport, and in the trenches, are given with what is meant to be unsparing fidelity to fact. Now and then we come across something that makes us doubt whether this fidelity is as exact as in a tale of this kind it should be. Would the wife of a Staffordshire chainraaker swear by the "White Christ" ? A parson, when he reads the burial service, may drone—writers of Mr. Blatchford's temper make him drone, as a matter of course— but he certainly does not pray God to forgive the sins of the deceased. It would have been as well for our imaginative author to take the precaution of consulting a Prayer.book. Finally, regiments in the Crimea were not commonly known by territorial names.
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