5 DECEMBER 1891, Page 12

At the Eleventh Hour. By Keith Fleming. (Routledge.)—This is another

of those dismal stories with which writers of fiction are at present afflicting us. The literary merit of this particular specimen of the fashionable novel of the day is of the very slightest,

but in gloom and, we must add, in improbability, it cannot easily be surpassed. It begins with the supposed elopement of a wife from her husband. This turns out, as the reader all along sus- pects, to have been no elopement at all. Of course the only person who remains obstinately ignorant of the truth is the husband himself. Naturally all sorts of tragical consequences follow, told with a most melodramatic rant. Perhaps the strangest thing in the book is the dialect which is put into the mouth of Rosalie the maid.