Broken Lives. By Robert P. Williams. (James Blackwood.)—Mr. Williams begins
with a prologue. A charming and beautiful and innocent girl, being overtaken by a storm, takes shelter with her friends in a farmhouse. Then, to while away the time, she reads aloud a bundle of MS. tales which a former lodger has left. The first tale has this for its plot. A woman marries an old man for his money; falls in love with a young man ; tries to poison her husband, offers herself to her lover in a most shameless way, and, being rejected by him, commits suicide. In the second tale, a bride on her wedding day sees her husband smashed by a train, and lives and dies a raving maniac. In the third story, a woman flirts with and then rejects a. lover; he goes mad, and is on the point of stabbing her in a tunnel, when an accident kills him and saves her. In the fourth, a girl is robbed of her lover by a forged letter written by a friend, and dies of a broken heart. After these cheerful and edifying stories have been read, the former lodger appears ; the reader's heart—there are pas- sages which we should not like to read aloud—is at once won ; and an epilogue tells of the ringing of the marriage bells. What a strange notion some people have of the beautiful and the pleasing I
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