Tam is one of the books which it seems so
easy but is really so difficult to write as they should be written. Shipwrecks and battles and fights with savages and searches for buried treasure have to be taken for granted by ordinary readers. They do not know what they are actually like, and are quite ready, therefore, to accept the descriptions which the tale. writer is pleased to give of them. But the little critics to whom The Getting Well of Dorothy will be submitted know all about the things which are brought into it. And then there is the difficulty of saying these common things in a way that is not common. The art of doing this is quite beyond defining. A few writers have it. Jane Austen had it on an entirely different literary plane. Mrs. Molesworth has it. And Mrs. Clifford shows, and not for the first time, that she has it also. This art certainly does not lie in the skilful construction of a story. The most exciting incident here is that Dorothy Murray loses the watch which has been the delight of her life ever since she has owned it, and recovers it after a piteous hour of search and despair. Surprises are not to the taste of the young people for whom these books are, or, at least, ought to be, written. (They are too often, as a matter of fact, written for their elders.) Who does not know how children resent any change from the way in which some long familiar story has been told ? It is thus, we take it, that they feel about a tale of this kind. It ought to go in the way that they expect. At the same time, there must be now and then something to touch their fancy or their sense of fun. There is, for instance, the way in which Dorothy directed a stranger who asked his way. We should use for directing-posts the things that we think most important, and so aid the inquirer; it was mit her fault if they were not quite so trustworthy as they 'night be. "If you go past the house where the big dog is, you will come to a cottage with a tabby cat sitting on the steps ; there is a stile just opposite, leading to the field where the sheep are; if you go across it, and walk along by the hedge, you Will see a lane with a high stone wall on one side, and a little brown pony on the other, and the Church is just a little way further." Then, again, there is the story of how Dorothy waits and waits on the day when her sister Betty is coming to be with her after a separation of some weeks. The time passes so cruelly slow, all the more slowly, perhaps, on account of the dearly loved watch. "Sixteen minutes past ten. Eleven o'clock was a long time coming; she wondered whether anything was the mattter with it, so that it would not come at all that morning. Perhaps it was going to be a day without any eleven o'clock in it; but, if so, what would become of mother and of the train, and of everything that had been going to happen at that time ? Of course, she knew that this idea was all nonsense, but it was so long to wait that she could not help all manner of things coming * The Getting We of Dorothy. By Mrs. W. L Clifford. London: Methuen and Co. [3s. Gcl.]
Altogether, this is a delightful little book, made, we must not forget to say, yet more attractive by Mr. Gordon Browne's very pretty drawings.
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