The Winds of Deal. By Latta Griswold. (Macmillan and Co.
6s.)—A. story of American school life is likely to prove new and rather difficult ground for the English reader who is unversed in the technicalities of baseball and the rival claims of Harvard and Princeton; but in Mr. Griswold's three stories, of which this is the latest, the sense of difficulty resolves itself into one of refreshing unfamiliarity, since he gives us not so much an actual history of the eventful monotony of a schoolboy's life, as an account of his psycho- logical development. We begin among a crowd of types of equal interest, which is slowly thinned out by twos and threes, until at last our whole attention is focussed on the one figure of George Erroll, who, perpetually hampered by trivial weak- L eases, and, although the author will not admit it, by his devouring egoism, never succeeds in " making good" among his fellows. Here is clever, intimate work, and a value and depth which are not common to school stories. Moreover, Mr. Griswold writes well, and has sufficient restraint to give us neither hero nor villain; for Meath, who was presumably oast for the latter role, delights us with his precocious brilliancy and his winning self-confidence.
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