NOVELS OF THE WEEK.* THE Dollar Library," a new series

of American fiction projected by Mr. Heinemann, makes an auspicious start with Mr. Hough's "Story of the Plains." The theme he has chosen is that of the wonderful westward expansion of the United States in the "sixties," the Civil War forming the prologue, and the sequel being set forth in three acts picturesquely en- titled the Day of the Buffalo, the Day of the Cattle, and the Day of the Plough. The best clue to the contents of this striking story is to be found in a brilliant passage describing the gourd-like growth of Ellisville, and the tone and temper of its early inhabitants :—

" It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man. The town became a loadstone for the restless

population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier Every man was armed. The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such a land. By day and by

• (L) The Girl at the Halfway House: a Story of the Plains. By E. Hough. "The Dollar Library." London: W. Heinemann. [4s. 2d.—(2.) Taken by Assault. By Morley Roberts. London: Sands and Cmes.]—(3.) The Column. By Charles Marriott. Loudon: John Lane. 6e.]—(4.) His Gan Father. By W. E. Norris. London: Hurst andSlacket 6d.]— (5.) Pro Petri& By Max Pemberton. London: Ward, Lock, and. Co. -Ps.) —(6.) The Salvatsen Seekers. By NoekAinslie. London: Methuen and Co. [cs.1—(7-.) Thes..italeinption of David .Corson. By C. F. poss. London: Methuen and Co. .[6s.]--t(8.) His Ilmnitiar Poe. By E. Livingston Prescott. London: Grant Richards. [6e.]—(9„) The Cardinal's Rose. By van Tassel

Sutphen: Loudon andBrothers. [eel

night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal, which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an experience less young. Money and life—the two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies—were in Ellisville the commodities in least esteem The men of that rude day lived vehemently. They died and they escaped. The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky; and the wild flowers

The social compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple It was the day of the individual, the day before the law. With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere Pen; but first there must be played the wild Prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Half way House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the Plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves than houses."

The series of episodes, tragic, heroic, and humorous, which illustrate this untrammelled existence are admirably chosen and portrayed, and their kaleidoscopic variety is held together by the continuous interest centred in the fortunes of the group of pioneers—soldiers of fortune and broken Southerners . —who form the leading dramatis persona. The heroine is a

Southern girl whose betrothed fell in repelling the attack on Louisburg, and the hero, a Captain in the army of the North,

first saw her searching for the dead body of her lover on the- field of battle. For chief humourist we have Battersleigh, a delightful Irish ex-cavalry officer, Quixote and miles gloriosus in one, and the minor characters comprise cowboys and Mexicans, emancipated slaves and Indians. But no words of ours can give a truer summary of the fascination of this fine romance than the passage we have cited above.

We are glad to welcome back Mr. Morley Roberts from his excursion into the domain of portrait fiction, which began

innocuously enough with A Son of Empire, and reached an altogether undesirable pitch of hero-worship and bugbear. baiting in The Colossus and Lord Linlithgow. It is true that Dr. Leyds appears in the pages of Taken by Assault, but only as a transient phantom. For the rest, the characters and inci- dents are imaginary, and one is not worried by the constant need of sifting fact from fiction entailed by the perusal of a roman a clef. Taken by Assault is the romance of a " revolt- ing " stepdaughter. Gwendolen Middleton, the heroine of the story, a high-spirited and intrepid young woman, lives in a state of chronic warfare with her stepmother. Matters reach a crisis when Mrs. Middleton brings pressure to bear upon Gwendolen's invertebrate sister Clare to induce her to throw over Captain Blake—who is a prisoner in Pretoria

—for an eligible country magnate. At this juncture Mr. Gordon Hardy, a hero who combines the driving powek

of a battering-ram with the diplomacy of a Machiavelli, comes to stay with the Middletons, falls in love with Gwendolen, and exacts a conditional assent to his suit,—the consideration being that he should procure the escape of Captain Blake. The sequel is concerned with the journey of Hardy into and out of Pretoria, a is Winston Churchill; the perils and sufferings of the fugitives on the veldt; the flight to Africa of Gwendolen ; the treachery of Clare, and the death —in happy ignorance—of her trusting lover. The story is told with Mr. Roberts's accustomed incisiveness and vigour, and the narrative of the escape is sufficiently thrilling. We must confess, however, to feeling a certain sympathy with the calculating stepmother. Methods such as those adopted by Gwendolen and her lover do not conduce to domestic disci- pline, and, as it turned out, were entirely unnecessary, since the soldier-lover was only rescued to be jilted by his fickle mistress.

Edward Hastings, the scholar recluse who settled down in Cornwall after his travels in the East, was the son of a small farmer who read Virgil, married a widowed Countess who was abducted by her relatives the morning after her wedding, and.

"found peace by looking down the barrels of his gun." It was obviously incumbent upon Daphne, the daughter of

Edward Hastings and heroine of The Column, to "live up to" her parentage and her bringing up, and we hasten to add that she does so with complete success. Edward Hastings had brought back from Greece a single Doric column, which he erected on the edge of a cliff. To this column Daphne paid

superstitions reverence, making it the symbol of an enlightened paganism of which she felt herself to be the true hierophant.

Now we have noticed that this adoration of stone or marble by modern heroes or heroines—vigorously condemned, we may note, by Sir Thomas Browne—is by no means conducive to longevity. In one of Mr. Hichens's stories a young man fell in love with the Sphinx and ultimately dashed his head against the monster. Disastrous results also attended the worshipper of an image in a tale by Mr. Le Gallienne. And here we have Daphne also doomed to an early grave by her uncompromising cult of the column. For Daphne, the robust and athletic, a splendid swimmer and horsewoman, marries a certain Basil Waring, whom, while serenading the column on her viola, she discovered lying with a broken leg on the rocks hard by. Basil Waring, a spectacled precieux, pseudo-philanthropist, and phrase-spinner of the most advanced type, by posing as an ardent admirer of Hastings's genius—Hastings had written an explosive work on ethics entitled Subsoil—won Daphne by his appeal to her filial devotion. But the column stood in the way of their domestic happiness, and eventually Daphne swam out to sea and was drowned. The bizarrerie of the plot is well matched by the author's desperate disinclination to say a plain thing in a plain way. The Column is a positive carnival of literary stilt-walk- ing. That it will exert a considerable intellectual titillation on minds trained to accept sophisticated phrase-coining as an evidence of genius, we can predict as confidently as that it will stir honest Philistines to homicidal exasperation. The plain person will content himself by observing that no real good can come out of a Cornish fishing village where an amateur orchestra is able to play Tschaikowsky without pro- fessional aid in the woodwind. People who transcend the barriers of destiny in regard to conversation and culture so outrageously as the dramatis persona of The Column must and ought to die young.

The heroine of Mr. Norris's story is also named Daphne, but that exhausts the resemblance between The Column and His Own Father. Here are no recondite or exotic emotions, no " Meredithyrambics " in style or sentiment; for although the machinery of the plot is more melodramatic than usual, the handling is as undeviatingly urbane as ever. The story is concerned with the courtship of Daphne Hamilton. the only child of a widow much addicted to foreign travel, by‘an enthusiastic and amiable young Austrian Count. Mrs. Hamilton opposes the match at the outset, first, because she wants to marry her daughter to an altogether eligible English officer who has come into a small fortune and left the Army; and second, because the Count resembles a gambler whom her husband caught cheating at cards, fought a duel with, and subsequently killed (as he believed) by accident. On ascertaining that the Count is the son of the defunct miscreant, Mrs. Hamilton gives him his dismissal, with Daphne's consent. But the Count refuses to accept the decision as final, comes over to England, resumes friendly relations with the Hamiltons, and eventually, on the discovery of his missing father, who has long been lying perdu under an alias, overbears all opposition and wins his bride. The irre- pressible Count is excellently drawn, but the character most after Mr. Norris's heart is Captain Jack Clough, a miracle of unselfishness, who is really in love with Daphne, but quite resigned to the hopelessness of his quest, and in the long run reaps no return for his prodigies of altruism beyond the leis- understanding of those whom he has sacrificed himself to serve. But Captain Clough is very far from being a tragic figure; he is quite comfortably resigned to the inevitable, and we have no misgivings as to his future.

The hero of Mr. Pemberton's new romance, Pro Patria', should cry with Hamlet "Well said, old mole ! Canst work i' the earth so fast?" for the main theme of the book is the making of a tunnel under the Channel to the shores of England. The hair-breadth escape of the hero when he has seen and grasped the meaning of the French Government's coal-borings at Calais are described in Mr. Pemberton's best style, but the interest flags somewhat towards the close. Whether the book, which represents France as a secret and bitter enemy, is politically in good taste, we leave our readers to decide. This question obviously does not trouble Mr, Pemberton, whose aim is to produce a book which cannot be laid down once it has been begun. We have said above that he succeeds excellently at first, but the present writer, at any rate, would very willingly have been relieved from reading the second half of the story. The Salvation Seekers, though a novel of modern everyday life, has a saving touch of fancy that lifts it a little above the level of most of its contemporaries. Mr. Ainslie's talent lies in portraiture, and before the end of the book the reader feels that he really knows the personages of the story. They are none of them exceptionally attractive, but, at any rate, they are alive. What is more, the reader cannot but regret the literary necessity which condemns the nicest person in the book, Nigel Leslie, to remain a hopeless cripple for the rest of his life. This we take to be the highest testimony to Mr. Ainslie's creative powers, for in how many modern novels does the hardened reviewer care a farthing what becomes of the characters after the final fall of the curtain?

America and fifty years ago are the place and time of Mr. Goss's new book, The Redemption of David Corson. All those pages which tell of the Quakers and life in the remote country regions are delightful reading. We are less attracted or interested by the somewhat lurid narrative of the hero's fall. But Mr. Goss most certainly succeeds in enabling his readers to realise the magic of the great forests, and the story is, on the whole, well worth reading. The last four chapters will appeal with special force to all lovers of Nature who, condemned by hard fate to a diet of novels in London, enjoy nothing better than to be transported on the wings of imagination to the heart of the woodlands.

Yet anoihr novel on the great drink question is Mr. Livingston Prescott's His Familiar Foe. It is, of course, sordid and horrible, as all novels which deal with the falls and uprisings of a drunkard must be, and as such may perhaps serve as an awful warming to some people. But of all novels with a purpose this class is perhaps the least attractive to the general reader.

It is extraordinarily difficult to seize the thread of The Cardinal's Bose. There are thrilling moments in this mysterious novel of adventure, but its general effect on the mind of the bewildered reader is rather a doubt, to para- phrase Calverley, as to "who on earth they were, and what this is all about."