An American Emperor. By Louis Tracy. (C. Arthur Pearson.) —Many
readers of this story, especially boys of the sort whose ideal author is Jules Verne, will enjoy the adventures, the hairbreadth escapes, and the marvellous triumphs attained by wealth in alliance with " science " with which it is filled. Even they, however, can hardly fail to be somewhat irritated by the tendency of the writer to fall back, in his desire to secure "effects," on what is little better than improbable farce. Even the chief of American millionaires, Jerome K. Vansittart, who founds the fourth French Empire, only to hand it over to the husband of the woman he seeks in the first instance to marry, is not in the least likely to offer a salary of £5,000 to a young man who is willing to serve him as secretary for £500, and the flooding of the Sahara is rather too much of a coup de !Wire. The crushing of the French Republic, with its President and its Ministry, may be not altogether impossible—the two Napoleons both achieved feats as remarkable—but the handing over of the fortunes of France to a second Henri of Navarre, who has never had a chance of exercising any personal mag- netism, is in these ultra-democratic days altogether incon- ceivable. At the same time, there is in the book quite a host of " incidents " of the most approved melodramatic character. The long protracted combat between Vansittart on the one hand, and on the other, the French Minister of the Interior, De Tournon, and his murderous instruments, who seem to have walked right out of the pages of Eugene Sue, is admirably worked up. Though the love-making in the book is not one of its strong points, Evelyn Harland is a delightful sketch of a charming, but not too weak or sweet, English girl. Boys, too, will take to their hearts Arizona Jim, who is as marvellous from the physical, as is his master and chief, Vansittart, from the intellectual, point of view.
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