FICTION.
LOBSTER SALAD.T
" YE miss a deal o' fun by having too much of it." Thus out of his own mouth we would in one sentence condemn and commend Mr. Lynn Doyle. Every one of the Irish stories contained in his new book, Lobster Salad, will make the reader laugh before he has finished it. But his love of farce spoils to • (1) The Dictionary of Applied Physics. Vol. II. (Electricity). Edited by Sir R. Glasebrook. London : Macmillan. [Ws. net.]—(2) The All Metric Aye. 1%y Adam (Iowans Whyte, B.Sc. London : Constable and Co. [7s. 6d.] 1,Oder Salad. By Lynn Doyle. London Duckworth. [7s. 6d. net.]
a great extent the humour of his stories. They quote better than they read. " Ye see, Mr. Doyle," says Pat Murphy, whl is supposed to toll the tales, " I've got a wee bit of a name round our part of the counthry for tellin' stories, an' that's a temptation. It's sometimes apt to make a trifle of a liar of you, specially if you've the name of tellin' funny stories. The truth's true, Mr. Doyle, but it's not very often funny." Here we cannot help thinking that Mr. Murphy is wrong. His storiei would be funnier if they seemed a little more true. On the rare occasions that he attempts pathos, he again goes too far. The reader cannot cry because somehow he cannot believe. All the same, and in spite of his impossible escapades, the little schoolmaster, the hero of most of the stories, is a real character and it is impossible not to like him, though it would be more impossible to say why. When he goes courting he is not very amusing, and when he gets his nose pinched in a drunken attempt to kiss a lobster we cannot laugh at all. On the other hand, when he doctors his sister's cat with whisky he is convulsively funny. The cat itself is a delightful animal. " A big cat with a coat on it like a sheep, that she called a Persian ; a conceited, useless baste that would sit washin' and polishin' itself with the mice rinanin' over it." The poor thing was like to die of kind- ness, for between the lazyness of him an' him bein' a greedy gorb of an animal," he grew to such a size that he could not walk. The failure of the whisky to cure the cat we are left to suppose cured the drunken schoolmaster. We would suggest to Mr. Doyle to write some more stories about him when sober.
Previous page
