Jack Locke. By Gordon Stables. (Frederick Warne and Co.)— This
story is one of this author's well-known melanges of fighting, brine, breezes, and sound boyish ethics. It lags a little at the beginning, for Dr. Stables appears to think it necessary to make his readers intimate not only with Jack Locke, but with Jack's father, Harry. But when he warms to his work, and, so to speak, launches Jack on his career, he is all himself. One gets a little tired of Nightingale Square and Hampshire, and especially of Jack's declaration that he is the happiest boy in Hampshire ; but not at all of the Bermudas or the Bahamas, the fights with privateers and picaroons, the mutiny on the high seas, or the final struggle with the French ship which secures Jack his promotion. Dan, the brutal yet Napoleonic Negro leader of mutineers, is perhaps the most remarkable figure Dr. Stables has yet drawn. Jack Locke is also more compact as a story than most of its author's works, and is freer than many from certain jokes which he affects, and the humour of which is at once too juvenile and too painfully obvious.
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