CURRENT LITERATURE.
GIFT-BOOKS.
A Southern Cross Fairy-Tale. By Kate McCosh Clark. (Samp- son Low.)—In this sumptuous gift-book, we have Santa Klaus at the Antipodes, introducing a little boy and girl—just such a boy and girl as are to be found in an average and well-conducted household—to the natural wonders and beauties, to the flora and the fauna, of New Zealand. In spite of fairies and gnomes, and of an astonishing amount of remarkably good verse about them, it is just possible that the child-reader of this fairy-tale will suspect the author of a design to instruct rather than to amuse him, especially when he is told that "the colours and habits of plants and animals are in sober reality just what they are made to appear in fairyland." Still, there is abundance of spirit, and there is no prosing in the book ; and then the illustrations, especially the pictures of birds—what a curious caricature of humanity is the parson-bird!—are superb. The story within the book ends well; for the children who are personally conducted into fairyland have a long-lost father restored to them on Christmas Day.
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