A Garden of Memories, and other Stories. By Margaret Veiny.
2 vols. (Macmillan and Co.)—Miss Veley has included in these two volumes three stories, all of them somewhat slender in texture, but all worked out with much delicacy and skill. We are inclined to think that the first of them is the beat, as giving a more definite picture. We can imagine the old picturesque garden, a genuine rus in urbo, which is the bone of contention between Mary Wynne and Thomas Brydon,—she wanting to keep it because it is associated with a sweet sentiment, he eager to bay it because he sees in it the only possible way of furnishing improved dwellings for a population in whose welfare he feels a keen interest. And the conflict between these two sentiments impresses us as being real, and one in which it is possible to feel a genuine interest. And there is skill, too, in the way in which the two are ultimately reconciled. Ice "Mrs. Austin," a young man fulls passionately in love with a woman older than him- self ; half out of compassion, half from an affection which her lover's passion has called into being, she makes up her mind to accept him, and lo ! he has changed. The third story is another variation on the familiar theme that first-loves are often variable. The lover in "Mrs. Austin" is a fine young fellow, in spite of his fickleness; the other characters, both in this and the third story, fail to interest us.
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