The Out caste. By F. E. Penny. (Chatto and Windus.
6a.)— The Outeaste is a Christian convert who returns to find grievous trouble in his home in a native state of India. His family stick at nothing in trying to reclaim him; and he only survives and is re-united to his wife by the help of the few English people in the town, and of a tolerant native friend who had been with him in England. The book is not merely a missionary story, though one character is engaged in senh work in the British territory outside the native state, and the modern tendency of missions to respect and study ancient creeds is fully brought out. What it does is to put forward the horrors of caste and that puzzle which we can never fully understand, namely, the existence in high caste families of deep, sometimes self-sacri- ficing religious feeling and great intellectual refinement, side by side with grossly superstitious formalism and cruelty, both physical and intellectual, such as the exquisite torture inflicted on the convert and his girl-wife. Mrs. Hulver, the managing, resourceful housekeeper, remains an amusing character, though the quotations from the accumulated wisdom of her husbands are much overdone.
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