Conjurer's House. By Stewart E. White. (Methuen and Co. 6s.)—This
"Romance of the Free Forest" takes us into a new field. Ned Trent has made his way as a "free trader" into the preserves of the Hudson's Bay Company ; it is his third • offence, and the unwritten law of the land ordains that ho must suffer for it. We must not anticipate any further Mr. White's story ; for a story it is in the true sense of the word, a characteristic which all writers of fiction have not the wish or the ability to give to their books. Tho one thing to which we object in Mr. White's work is the style; for a time, that is, till he is more interested in what he has to say than how he says it, this is full of strange affects.- tions. " Thanks for this generosity,' cried the young man in a tone of declamatory eloquence so artificial as fairly to scent the elocutionary." But there is undoubted merit in this picture of a landscape under the Aurora Borealis. "In comparison with this coruscating dome of the infinite the earth had shrunken to a narrow black band of velvet in which was nothing distinguishable until suddenly tho sky-line broke in calm silhouettes of spruce and fir. And always the mighty River of the Moose, gleaming, jewelled, barbaric in its reflections, slipped by to the sea."
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