Love and a Sword. By Kennedy King. (John Macqueen.)— Mr.
King is a trifle too anxious to crowd his pages with incidents and to drag past events and future possibilities into his net as a romancist. One would have thought that the Afridi War, with the charge of Dargai, and other episodes of a more than ordinary "thrilling" character, would have been quite enough, with appro- priate illustrations, for a volume of between three hundred and four hundred pages. But Mr. King must needs give Roderick Gordon—of course a hero of the Afridi War could have no other name than Gordon—a desperate fight with somebody or other almost every second, an apparently hopeless love complication, and three terrible enemies, Petroff, Alsakoff, and the Italian Ferreida, who are spies in the service of Russia. In the long and desperate conflict between Gordon and Petroff, Mr. King shows something more than a mere tendency to overdo things, and in the end Jessica Martin gets rather too hurriedly rid of her first and quite unexceptionable lover. One forgets impossible, and even undesirable, things, however, in the rush of narrative, which is very effective in its way. Mr. King, like a good artist, also takes care to introduce actual historical incidents into his story. The bulk of the illustrations, indeed, which are almost photographic in their realism, represent such incidents.
That the changes which were recently introduced into the Quiver, with a view to its being modernised and made a worthy rival to magazines of the up-to-date order, have been attended with satisfactory results is clearly proved by the handsome annual volume (price 7s. 6d.) which has now made its appearance. There is plenty of "Sunday reading" of the popular, though also more solid, kind in it; but on the other hand, there is a great deal of what can only be considered useful information of the secular kind. The majority of the serial stories, such as Agnes Giberne's " In the Great Peril," which revives the memories of the Indian Mutiny, are enjoyable simply as popular novels are enjoyable. "The White Woman," by Mr. Tirebuck, a spirited story of love and missionary adventure, recalls at once Jules Verne and Mackay of Uganda. Various aspects of modern religious life, such as the May meetings and gatherings at Lambeth Palace., have ample justice done to them. This is a volume which is admirably adapted to be a Sunday-school prize.
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