THE DIARY OF A GOOSE GIRL.
The Diary of a Goose Girl. By Kate Douglas Wiggin. (Gay and Bird. 3s. 6d.)—Mrs. Wiggin is one of the pleasantest of living writers. Her mind is essentially sunny and amusable, and she has a peculiarly happy gift of making an agreeable narrative of the slightest experience. • The adventures recorded in this little book have happened to thousands of persons every summer ; but how many would think to make a volume of them ? Briefly, the author, tired of the restrictions of a hydropathic establishment, took lodgings for a few weeks in a farmhouse in Sussex and helped the daughter of the house with the poultry. Upon this slender theme Mrs. Wiggin embroiders charmingly, the result being a little epic of the fowl-run, a saga of the duck-pond. It is impossible after reading these pages ever to think of poultry again quite as mere birds ; like Mrs. Wiggin, one will dramatise and invent until the hen rises a heroine, the gander a martyr. Here is a typical passage of quiet fun :—" When we have closed all our small hen-nurseries for the night, there is still the large house inhabited by the thirty-two full-grown chickens which Phoebe calls the broilers. I cannot endure the term, and will not use it. Now for the April chicks,' I say every evening. 'Do you mean the broilers ?' asks Phoebe. I mean the big April chicks,' say I. 'Yes, them are the broilers,' says she." The book is not all geese and fowls ; there are human beings, too—Mrs. Heaven and Mr. Heaven and the Square Baby—all of whose oddities are very amusingly and sympathetically set down by the historian. Altogether, a most companionable little volume.
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