Mildred's Wedding. 3 vols. By Francis Derrick, anther of the
Kiddie-a- Prink. (Warne.)—This is a sensation novel of the old- fashioned school The scene is laid on the Cornish coast, the physical and moral aspects of things are in keeping throughout the story—wild and weird-like. We have old families with the local mark of Tre and Pol, and grey old mansions,
"Over which there hung a cloud of fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted ;"
—mysteries without end, and murders, and personations, and at the end a general chassez-croisez of rightful and wrongful heirs. But granted extravagant incidents and unnatural people, granted ladies who let in robber chiefs to their fathers' houses, admirals who inveigle their elder brothers on board ship and substitute pressed men for them, somnam- bulists who make discoveries and write them down unconsciously for the benefit of plotters, secret prisoners, secret wills, and secret marriages,— granted all this, we have no reason to complain of the story ; the lurid atmosphere is well maintained, the language is picturesque, and the interest does not flag. Only at the end, when everybody tarns out to be related to everybody else, it would be useful to have a genealogical tree to refer to ; it is almost impossible to make out the degrees of kin, at least without such an amount of labour as no reader of fiction expects to have imposed upon him or her. The story is told in her old age by the somnambulist. She relates how she was transformed into a sort of witch-child in early life through the mysteries of the old house in which she was brought up, having been entrusted by her father to the care of the two aristocratic ladies who inhabited it under an awful shadow, how her father had injured these ladies, how they determined. to avenge themselves, and how they were frustrated, and thus takes the reader through the startling incidents at which we have hinted to a conclusion, the happiness of which is only marred by a butcher's bill of two killed and one missing.
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