GIFT-BOOKS.
THE WONDERFUL INVENTION.*
Miss CORNWALL LEGH shows her wonted skill in her drawing of character•. The situation is not capable of such fine treat- ment as was Mary's prison life in Gold in the Furnace, but it is well conceived and well managed. Alice Easterbrook's great interest in life is her half-brother Arthur, whom she has rescued from his father, a criminal of the gentlemanly type, who makes burgling into a fine art. The boy disappears,— that is hard enough to bear ; but when she finds him, and he elects to stay with his father•, who has a real fondness for him, and of whose true character he is innocently ignorant, then all the foundations of her• faith are broken up. Prayer• and worship become empty forms to her. The subject, it will be seen, is substantially the same as in the earlier story. Nor is there any moral which there is more need to enforce—in this kind of fiction we want a moral if it be well put—than that we have to find out whether the faith which blossoms finely in the sunshine is hardy enough to survive the frost. The criminal father plays a part in the story, and we admire the self-restraint with which Miss Cornwall Legh manages him. There is nothing like the cheap and easy conversion. We are taken, indeed, to bis death- bed, but all that we hear from his lips is a significant com- bination of the two strongest feelings of his life,—the interest of his sinister profession, and his love for his boy. He has tried to make a provision for the child out of the proceeds of one of his robberies, and that is all that be can think of. The disappointment of the story is in "the wonderful invention." Possibly it comes from the refinement of the author's art. " Along the King's Highway " is the second title of the book, and the first chapter introduces to us an inventor who is on his way to make his fortune in London. Naturally one thinks of something which is to revolutionise industry, and to endow obscure genius with a fortune. What " Jim Marston "invents we shall not say, but we must frankly own to a certain vexation when we find that the reward is a chauffeur's situation.
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