My Australian Girlhood. By Mrs. Campbell Praed. (T. Fisher Unwin.
6s. net.)—Mrs. Campbell Praed gives us here a succes- sion of striking pictures. For some she is indebted to her own experience ; some she takes from family records; there is, in particular, a very pleasing little love story, drawn from "grand. mother's box." There are, of course, lights and shadows, and, as one might expect in a country where all is so new, and the experiences of many generations, as they would be in the Old World, are crowded into a single lifetime, the contrasts are some. times very strongly marked. What we are told of the relations between black and white is tragical in the extreme. There were wrongs on both sides and mutnal hatred of the inost savage kind ; but it is impossible to denythat the white man began the dismal series of revenge. And he is responsible for the peculiar horror of buying the services of the blacks against their own kith and kin. There is nothing in the whole compass of Oedipodoan or Thyestean tragedy to equal the hideous boast of the native who had tracked down his own mother.
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