False Steps. By Douglas Dalton. (Tinsley Brothers.)'—" My sweet Lorrie,"
says the father of the heroine to his newly-recovered daughter, "how marvellously you remind me of your mother. The very mole she bad on her neck is reproduced in you." Mr. Douglas Dalton must have but a small sense of humour when be puts in this "mole." Does he not know that it is a stock joke ? But it is not in humour only that he would seem to be deficient. His story is mainly taken up with the career of a certain Jack Vigors, a roué, cardsharper, and swindler generally. Vigors reforms, and finds himself "infinitely happier in the possession of a wife and a gradually increasing family than he bad ever conceived possible whilst preying on the susceptibilities of his fellow-men." Mr. Vigors had been preying on something much more tangible than susceptibilities.
propos of this we haves loud complaint against "Protestant Eng- land" (what has Protestantism got to do with it ?), because in it "indelible brands are almost daily burnt in for the sin of a moment." One of Vigors's sins of a moment is to spend a week or more in manipulating the cards at a gambling resort; another is to represent himself as possessed of a reversion to which he never was entitled.
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