In the Spring-Time, by Alice Weber (Walter Smith and limes),
is an advance even on that most delicate study, "Angela." It is a simple story of every-day life, and every-day people of the End that have houses both in town and country, and that can yet use the world as not abusing it. Of poor Nell Middleton, the heroine—if she can possibly be called a heroine—one can but say, as was said of her often after her death by the relative who under- stood her character best,—" I never knew a more simple-minded, trusting child—a more perfectly self-forgetting woman." She does not live long enough to do a very great deal of good in a direct fashion, for she dies of a cold which itself was the result of watching a University Boat-race. But she lives long enough to have a decided influence for good on the character of her cousin Archie—the person in whom she is most interested— and Queenie, the girl to whom he is engaged. But In the Spring-Time is, happily, not all pathos and self-sacrifice. Nell is not quite a saint ; on the contrary, she has her almost jealous moods, and her periods of irritability, while she actually sends a lover—and such a good lover !—about his business. In the Spring-Time is full of undergraduate fun, girlish high spirits, and unconventional small-talk, in spite of its commendable elevation of tone and religious feeling. Miss Weber has not a superior, she has hardly a rival, in the particular walk of fiction which she has selected for herself.
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