CURRENT LITERATURE.
Reminiscences of Australian Early Life. By a Pioneer. (A. P. Marsden.)—There are few pretensions to literary form in these reminiscences of a pioneer, but their very stiffness and limited vocabulary renders their genuineness the more apparent. They extend over a period that takes in twelve years before and twelve
years after the discovery of gold. Thus we have the early stage of sheep-farming, the depressed stage, when the rush for the dig- gings took place, and then the revival of the sheep-industry, which however, is not much dwelt upon, as the bushrangers take up most of the space. The "pioneer" has personal reminiscences of the more celebrated bushrangers, and most interesting they are, too. Still nothing, for genuine interest and truthful delineation of the life of those early days, is better than the earlier chapters. No one certainly can have more right to the designation of pioneer than the writer of these Australian experiences.
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