The Black Forest : its People and Legends. By L.
G. S4guin. (Strahan and Co.)—This is a cross between an ordinary guide-book and a collection of old German legends, and as such forms no bad companion to the tourist in the Black Forest. The tourist must, however, be a lazy one,—ono given to hanging about out-of-the-way corners of the forest, and able to enjoy life among the old-world peasantry. For the ordinary, galloping sight-seer, this book would have very little value. Miss Seguin evidently loves the Black-Forest people, and describes their industry and homely life very pleasantly, in the intervals between her numerous stories. One of their industries is clock-making, to which many of the peasants devote themselves, while still, as in some of the Swiss watch-making cantons, retaining and cultivating their plots of ground or little farms. The greater part of the cultivated land appears to be owned by the cultivators, who are, like all peasant-pro- prietors, a hard-working, thrifty, limiest, and conservative people. Miss Stiguin states that the clock-making industry alone employs 14,000 persons, including women and children. Another great forest industry is wood-cutting. There is a company known as the Schiffes-Gesellschaft, which dates from the sixteenth century, and is composed of a vast number of small peasant pro- prietors, and by this company the wood-cutting industry is princi- pally regulated and carried on. It, and the Government and the Prince of Fiirstenberg own the greater part of tho forest, and every year enormous quantities of wood are cut and conveyed to Holland. Huge rafts are formed, by the union of small ones, collected in the streams that permeate the forest, until, when the Rhine is reached, these rafts become great floating villages, sometimes as much as 700 feet long, and inhabited by the raftmen, their wives, and families. From £15,000 to 220,000 worth of wood is frequently contained in ono of these rafts, which, in their infant stages, may often be seen shooting rapids in the upper streams of the forest, with a swiftness that severely tests the skill, courage, and strength of those who guide them. Of the legendary part of the book we cannot say much that is good. Comparatively few of the stories are worth preserving, and they arc lugged in neck- and-crop with or without occasion or provocation. They thus swell the volume in a patchy kind of way, suitable, perhaps, for the lazy tourist, as we have said, but not calculated to make the book valuable. The art of the book is, in short, not to be compered with that displayed in a previous work of the same writer's, called the French Village, and we lay it down with the feeling that somehow the author has partly missed a good opportunity.
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