From a Garret. By May Kendall. (Longmans.)—There is some fine
pathos and some not less admirable humour in this little volume. The old scholar who pawns a volume of lEschylas for foarpenoe and spends threepence of it on a poor child whom he finds at the pawn-shop door, and poor Roger Hyndson, the carrier of parcels, with his hopeless love for Theresa, are sketches that one can hardly look at dry-eyed. Then, for humour, of a somewhat grim sort, indeed, but effective, we have the Alderman, director of a Tramway Company which works its men eighteen hours a day, who makes up by his own exertions the general average of food and sleep. And who does not recognise a familiar bore, which nevertheless it amuses one to read of, in the Anglo-Israelite ? "When I first knew him," says the Chemist, who is the agnostic among Miss Kendall's dramatis personx, "it was the great pyramid. The grand passage through the great pyramid was the Christian Era, the inches were years. There wasn't a crack in the floor but meant Napoleon, or Oliver Cromwell, or penny-postage. The whole thing was a prophecy in stone built by Melchizedek." Who that has been condemned to hear an exposition of Anglo- Israelite views, into which persons apparently sane sometimes break quite unexpectedly, is not consoious, as the "Scholar" puts it, that his "mind is becoming gradually and painlessly unhinged " ? This little book is excellent in many ways.
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