The story is too lightly drawn to be judged by stern standards; and the delicacy of its execution entitles it to praise. Its little faults, and even a few absurdities, are of a kind to make it seem absurdly hypercritical to comment on them harshly. If Helwyze's eyes are a little too intensely black and magnetic, if Olivia is a trifle too "sumptuous," and "the villa," as we intimated, magnificent beyond the power of all upholstery, why should we quarrel with the too liberal fancy that created them? "A Modern Mephistopheles" remains a fresh and dainty fantasy; and this was all its author offered.

"That Lass o' Lowrie's" is a novel American by authorship, though its scene is laid in the coal-region of English Lancashire; in which county, if a current newspaper paragraph may be believed, the author of the book, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, passed some years of girlhood. It is essentially a well-told story, of a not extraordinary sort, but chiefly noteworthy for the excellence of its local color, and for one or two well-drawn types of character. The heroine, a pit-girl surrounded by every kind of coarsening influence, doing a man's work in the mines, and beaten and bullied by a brutal father, is the strong figure of the novel; and Mrs. Burnett's merit lies in this, that she succeeds in bringing out the whole womanliness of this girl's nature, and in showing her development into an altogther different being, and yet does not call in cant or impossible absurdities to aid her in the task. Joan Lowrie is by no means one of those familiar characters who, in the midst of a phenomenally vicious career, suddenly grow seraphic wings before the very eyes of the observer, and begin incontinently to chatter the platitudes that mark “a change of heart." Her mental growth is quiet and consistent, on the whole; and if her natural strengths at the beginning are a little puzzling to one disposed to reason logically from her education and surroundings, yet we are far from saying that they are impossible.

Some of the minor characters are excellently done, notably "owd" Sammy Craddock, the village oracle and humorist, and Jud, a refreshingly natural and unregenerate boy. The leading persons, excepting always Joan herself, though not ill-drawn, are more conventional; nor is the story's plot a very new one apart from its fresh dress, not new enough, at all events, to con

tain any surprises for the least-hardened novel-reader. Fergus Derrick, the London engineer sent down to take charge of Riggan collieries, somewhat of a muscular Christian, who strides "like a young son of Anak, brains and muscle evenly balanced and fully developed," is by no means a new acquaintance, and has no unfamiliar part to play. Large odds might be given (to speak after the worldly fashion), that he would reform the coal-pits, thrash the local bully (who in this case chances to be Joan Lowrie's father), and become a hero to Joan herself. But he is a good healthy type of hero, like others of his school, and we have no quarrel with him. His friend Paul Grace, the "little parson," frail and sensitive, but full of pluck in a crisis, also has his prototypes in other fiction, yet is not an unwelcome figure; and has his natural companion in Anice Barholm, the rector's daughter, who is the feminine agent in Joan's elevation, and who, to her glory be it said, justifies the praise that one of her poor protegés bestows upon her, "Yo' dunnot harry me wi' talk." It is because it does not "harry us wi' talk" that Mrs. Burnett's novel is successful above others of its kind.

We were not in the least prepared, we willingly confess, to find much pleasure in the three short stories, "The Jericho Road," "The Barton Experiment," and "The Scripture Club of Valley Rest." All of them are announced, though not upon their title-pages, as having the same author, Mr. John Habberton, whose last year's trifle, "Helen's Babies," proved a success that may have marked a white day in the calendar of its publisher, but certainly gave not the faintest promise of better or more serious work upon its writer's part. If we have been agreeably disappointed, we would not convey the idea- unjust alike to Mr. Habberton and to ourselves that it is because we have found in these three Western sketches anything of great intrinsic value. More purely tentative, experimental bits of writing could hardly be imagined; and it is so obvious that they are nothing more, that we are almost sorry to see them clothed in the dignity of separate volumes, instead of passing their ephemeral lives between the covers of the magazines, or gaining at most the permanence of a "collection." Their worth is simply in their revelation of new possibilities; in promises concerning the fulfilment of which we cannot prophesy, since that depends on Mr. Habberton's own earnestness, the quality of his

ambition, and his ability to rid himself of certain crudities not only of expression, but of thought.

All the stories deal with a kind of Western life that is altogether new to literature; not the Pike County civilization of John Hay's ballads, nor the picturesque barbarism of Bret Harte's mining country, but the hard, prosaic, and angular life of villages on Western lakes and rivers; life that has grown up within moral and social lines as rigid and ungraceful as " fever an' ager" ever made the gaunt contours of those who live it. The types of character that Mr. Habberton chooses to treat cannot be overlaid with sentimentalism; and the one fact would show his art to be beyond the common, that he has kept them from being only repellent and useless studies of pure harshness, for which their mere fidelity to nature could hardly be a sufficient raison d'être. In spite of all their utter want of picturesqueness, and in spite, too, of the rather stiff didactic purpose which is almost naïvely stated as the motive for his giving us their story, he has made his people very human, and his local coloring so nearly perfect as to show a power he ought not to neglect.

We have not space to go into the detail of the stories. By far the best of them, "The Jericho Road," is concerned with the problem of what may happen to the weak member of a rude society when, as Mr. Habberton puts it in his preface, the Good Samaritan does not come along. "The Barton Experiment" is the history of a "Temperance Reform " in Barton Village, wherein the reformers' eyes were opened to certain practical aspects of the matter of intemperance and the community's business with the drunkard which had hitherto escaped them, as they have escaped the eyes of other and more cultured classes. "The Scripture Club of Valley Rest" pleases us least of all the three, not because in its history of the shades of opinion, the difficulties and the types of character appearing in the Bible-class of a village church, it approaches more closely to a purely didactic book than even either of the others; but because its figures are so much more crudely drawn, and show so much less invention and spirit than the two earlier stories lead us to expect.

Mr. Habberton is entering upon his work as heavily handicapped as a new author can be, -weighted with a meaningless success, and with the constant temptation to do hurried work because he

knows a similar success awaits whatever he may publish. But in the "Jericho Road" and the " Barton Experiment" there is distinct evidence of a talent which should in time give better results than these two trifles.

The books whose titles end our somewhat random list may be described without injustice in the compass of a paragraph. "Nimport" is clearly the production of a writer who has his hardest lesson yet to learn in the subordination of his own somewhat obtrusive cleverness, before the few uneven merits of his work can bear a large proportion to its great defects. To write a volume with so obvious an effort to say telling things, and not to say any, would be beyond the power of any person moderately equipped with wit and general reading; so that "Nimport" is not altogether without its epigrams and touches of good characterization. Yet, as a whole, it cannot but be rated wearisome; and the bad habit of a leading person of the story, in communicating her adventures in letters of that odious kind written to be read aloud amid the hearers' praises of their "cleverness," can only be a warning to many wise novel-readers that the book is to be shunned. Gail Hamilton's "First Love is Best" is simpler in its style and altogether better than what might perhaps be looked for by habitual readers of its author's works; and yet it fully justifies her long apology for entering upon the novelist's domain. What is good in this story would have been still better said in the essay form in which she has already written somewhat overwritten, possibly. And what is otherwise than good might thus have passed unnoticed, being of that peculiar sort of commonplace which never strikes one as particularly stupid till put into the mouths of characters in fiction.

EDWARD L BURLINGAME.

VOL. CXXV. ·

- NO. 258.

21

ART. VII."FAIR WAGES."

THE newspapers have fallen into line to defend the railway companies, who thus have brought all the great guns of public opinion. to bear on one side of the fight, so the strikers have got the worst of it before the community. We have been so handled that if a workingman stands out to speak his mind, the public have theirs so full of pictures of him and his doings in the illustrated papers, that he is listened to as if he was a convicted rough pleading in mitigation of penalty, instead of an honest and sincere man asking for a fair show. I would not have any one mistake what my principles are and have been. I don't envy any man his wealth, whether it is ill-gotten or not. I am a workingman, therefore an honest one, and would refuse a dollar I did not earn, for I am neither a beggar to accept charity nor a thief to take what belongs to another, however he came by it. If it be his according to law, I, for one, am ready to protect him in his legal rights, and in return I want to be protected in what I believe to be mine.

Forty years ago my father came over to this country from Sweden. He had a small business and a large family. In Europe business does not grow as fast as children come, and poverty over there is an inheritance. He heard that North America was peopled and governed by workingmen, and the care of the States was mainly engaged in the welfare and prosperity of labor. That moved him, and so I came to be born here. He, and millions like him, made this country their home, and their homes have mainly made this country what it is. Until lately the States kept their faith and promise to the people, and we, the people, showed ours when trouble came; an assessment of blood was made on our shares of liberty, and we paid it. That is our record. We did not fight for this party or that party, but for the country and against all that were against the United States.

I am no politician, caring little whether one party or another holds the fort at Washington. My father, who, like me, was a workingman, used to say a country fared best where a strong