Eli's Daughter. By J. H. Pearce. (William Heinemann.)— This is
a powerful, ably written, and, so far as character and dialect are concerned, eminently realistic story of Cornwall and Cornish mines. From the purely literary point of view it marks a decided advance upon "Saco Treloar," a previous story by the author, powerful as that was. And yet it is in certain respects but a commonplace plot that we have in Eli's Daughter. Dewence Trewavas marries the agriculturist Abe Tregarthen, while her heart is the "crabber" Hal Tredinnick's. Abe himself, on the other hand, is really more in love with Dewence's cousin Kitty Minnie than with Dewence herself—although at first he is unconscious of the fact. This sort of thing has happened often -enough in fiction, and is probably not altogether unknown even in the region of fact. But Mr. Pearce works these old materials up into an essentially new tragedy in which there figure seduction and, if not positively murder, a homicide which looks remarkably like it, and which ends as badly as it well could, inas- much as Hal and Dewence, even when the death of Abe has given them freedom to marry, decline to take advantage of the opportunity thus afforded them. The strength and originality of Eli's Daughter, however, lie not in plot but in several of the characters. Dewence, Hal, Abe, even that modern edition of Hetty Sorrel, Kitty Minnie, are admirably sketched. But the true hero of the story is the marvellous miner and religious fanatic, Eli himself, whose bigotry is accentuated by the all but fatal accident that happens to him. He is one of the most remarkable characters that have appeared in modern fiction. Mr. Pearce has command of a really admirable style ; he is capable of being impressive without being either too sensational or too vulgarly "smart," as in such sentences as "It was an odd mixture, the religion of Eli—as odd a mingling of obscure mental fetishes and of dim and shadowy racial memories as the most fantastic in- tellect could have collected for itself. But for years it had answered Eli's needs fairly well, and carrying it with him as an amulet, he felt quakingly content. Even the glimmering happi- ness he had attained through religion had, however, been put an end to through the accident in the mine. By affecting his brain in some subtle but deadly fashion this had reduced him to be a helpless captive of the melancholy that had so long been stealthily haunting his life."
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