6 OCTOBER 1894, Page 27

Graeme and Cyril. By Barry Pain. (Hodder and Stoughton.) —This

is a story of boy-life, with the scene mainly, of course, laid at school, but completed by an introductory sketch of home and a notice of the hero's subsequent career. The school scenes seem to us decidedly good, whether it is the private and preparatory or the public school that is described. The dialogue is spirited and easy, and no one knows till he has tried, how difficult a thing it is to make boys talk on paper as they talk in life. The story has a moral, but it is not intended, though wo cannot but think that the tragical end of the "bad boy" is a little too much in the way of melodrama. A lad with the sort of badness that is here described is bound to come to grief, but the grief would scarcely be of such a kind. At such an age he would not run away in So reckless a fashion. A boy of ten who had been reading about brigands, and so forth, might do it.