Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. By Alice Caldwell Hegan.
(Hodder and Stoughton. 5a.)—This is a finely drawn little study of life. Mrs. Wiggs is a Mark Tapley with the farce left out, the farce being quite in its right place where Dickens put it, but in- appropriate here. Her courage, her cheerfulness, never more than temporarily obscured, and the promptitude with which the moment she gets her head a little above water she thinks of lifting up the head of some one else, make a very delightful picture. And Mrs. Wiggs's children are worthy of her, not because they are unnaturally perfect—that they certainly are noi —but because their very naughtinesses are of a hopeful and promising kind. And then there is a little love-story running through the tale. Of course it does not run smoothly ; but
we are not seriously troubled. Altogether this is a delightful little book, of a kind which we seem to get in its best quality from the States. Perhaps Miss Hegan will oblige us again, and take occasion to tell us of the fortunes of the three "little women," Asia, Australia, and Europeena.
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