7 JANUARY 1865, Page 26

Tales at the Outspan. By Captain A. W. Drayson. (Saunders

and Otley.)—We are happy to see that this oddly named volume has reached a second edition. It is a boy's book of the very best kind, a book of adventure, and peril, and excitement, pervaded by a most healthful flavour of exertion, and enterprise, and self-denial. Captain Drayson, too, understands the natural history of the great region he describes, and manages to make his readers understand it also without boring them to death by quasi-scientific descriptions. The only fault of the book is that of Captain Marryat's sea tales. It may give juvenile readers too pleasant an idea of the life it professes to describe. An

African colonist's life is not all hunting, any more than a middy's life is all adventure and practical joking.