... THE RIDDLE OF LAWRENCE HAVILAND (3 vols.: Bentley and Son), by Constance Smith, who so promisingly introduced herself to the novel-reading world by The Repentance of Paul Wentworth, is a novel of ...

... ,3V roup of Jfoble Jlmnes. By THOMAS HARDY, Author of 11 far From the Madding Crowd f IVessex Tales f &c. Preliminary THE President looked from the window at the descending snow, and broke the silence ...

... THAT TEEEIBLE NAME A STORY. YES, said the vicar as he sat with his feet on the fender, times are indeed growing harder. The butcher's bill came again yesterday, and tithes are running down daily. Then as he looked at his better half's sad face he added gaily, We shall soon have to emigrate. Perhaps Stanley would make me Bishop of Kilima-Njaro or the Mbemomos. It is ill work laughing, ...

... IT is a paradox-- meaning a real truth, though a seeming absurdity-- that whoever would study what is left of rustic England cannot do better than confine his operations to the Home counties. It is in ...

... AUDREY, by Margery Hollis (3 vols. Bentley and Son), is a very much better novel than could be expected as the outcome of so unpromising a subject as the deceased wife's sister. The theme is the dif ...

... Know you what I would do, did I wish to punish an enemy after my death? 1 would leave him my fortune. This is the motto chosen by Alice M. Diehl for the title-page of her new novel, Her Three Lover ...

... A HOESE-DEALEE'S POLISHING IRONS. Two of them goes to a fall, said old Farmer Arkwright, as his cob Topper hit his toe and pecked forward on the road, while trotting from his residence in The Golden Valley to Barton Fair, then going on at Gloucester, whither the ponderous old yeoman was riding on the 28th of September, 1870, to lure a cowman in the place of the one who was about to leave him ...

... SIX POUNDS. A WEEK. MR. BARKER, the good-natured little country doctor, was going to start on the morrow for his annual autumn holiday. This year his locum tenens was to be an old fellow student, one William Parkinson, a rising light from one of the manufactur ing towns of the North, who had snapped at the chance of obliging an old friend and obtaining three weeks' rest and idleness in the ...

... MR. CHRISTIE MURRAY is invariably at his best in dealing with the life and character of the Black Country, and especially when he keeps clear of that far less interesting region called Society. In ...

... APPLES OF SODOM, by Miss Bramston (2 vols.: Walter Smith and Innes), is a novel decidedly above the average quality in point of literary merit as well as in ambition. Moreover, it will certainly int ...

... A BIT OF SPOET. IT was in India last year I met the Commissioner O'Leary. A little, roundabout man he was, with a merry twinkle in his eye and a brogue you might cut with a knife. I tooled him over to inspect a station he had to visit, he admired my Arab, we discovered a mutual love of horses, and over this and that joke and anecdote we became good friends, and spent a merry evening together. ...

... KINLOCH AULT LODGE. A TALE OF SCOTLAND, 1890. By Rev. M. G. Watkins. Author of Ail M.D.'s Tale, c., S;o. CHAPTER I. Oil the gallant fisher's life, It is the best of any 1 Old Soya. WHAT has brought you up here so early as the end of June? asked one man of another from the depths of an easy chair in the smoking-room. They had just lit their cigars, and were revelling in the evening weed by ...