A Scotch Wooing. By J. C. Ayrton. 2 vols. (Henry
S. King and Co.)— This is a spirited story, reminding us, and intended to remind us, of "North and South." Arundel Fielding goes down to a Scotch manu- facturing town to be the inmate of her uncle's home, he being a shrewd old Scotehman, who has made one fortune, and intends to make another. Here she falls in with a clever and well-educated man, in whom the uncle, whose enterprise is too much for the courage of his ordinary fellow-townsmen, has found a congenial partner. The two have many a battle-royal over the relative merits of things Northern and Southern, and beginning with something not far short of aversion, end with some- thing a good deal beyond liking. The plot of the love-story itself is not, in our judgment, very skilfully managed. Misunderstandings so serious are, one is happy to think, not so easy to cause, and not so difficult to remove, as some novelists would have us think. And when the com- plication has been created, it is disentangled a little too summarily. The intervening deliverer speaks quite truly, when he talks of having "cut the Gordian knot," but in real life knots have to be painfully untied. But the book is really worth reading, with characters well drawn and dialogue clever and natural.
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