Among the Bracken. By Mrs. Hartley Perks. (Archibald Constable and
Co.)—This is a rather ingenious and very pleasant story of Scotland—though not quite of the " Railyard school "—and that in spite of such a repellent and gorgeously conventional beginning as, "It was a May morning—a morning breathing the dewy incense of spring, choked by singing birds, whose many voices rose and fell in waves of harmony." Most of the con- veniently few characters who appear in it are well drawn, although the doctor's man, Laban Loney, with his attacks upon " weemen folk," is too elaborately Scotch. The doctor's two daughters, Sarah the nurse, who is unhappily married to an actor, her younger sister Alison, who all but goes the same way, John Haseltine, the minister, who is of cburse passionately in love with Alison, and the frivolous but not absolutely heart- less young man who is his rival, have all the stamp of reality. All girl readers who approve of pretty endings will think that Mrs. Perks has done rightly in causing Alison finally to make love to a member of the professional class for which she cherishes so unreasoning a dislike.
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