read a couple of pages before the charm of the style laid hold
upon me. The story is quite simple, concerned only with a group
of peasants, fisher-folk, living on the banks of a great river.
GREGOROVITSH is like TOURGENIEV in his devotion to peasant and country
types, but otherwise more akin to our own younger school of realists
in the minuteness of his observation. Throughout the story abounds in
character-study of a kind that, while building up the figure with a
thousand details, will add suddenly some vivid touch that brings the
whole wonderfully and unforgettably to life. An example of this is
_Akim_, that perfect type of the hopeless incompetent, whose very
futility, while it rightly exasperates his fellows, makes him a
delight to the reader; so that his death, at the end of the first
part, comes with an effect of personal loss. For my own part, as poor
_Akim_ had never once before accomplished what he set out to do, I
was quite expectant of his recovery, and proportionately disappointed.
Throughout also there are pen-pictures of Russian scenery, full of
vivid colour; while the story itself, though inevitably in a somewhat
minor key, is never sordid or pessimistic. Emphatically therefore a
book for everyone to read who cares to know the best in the literature
of our great Ally.

* * * * *

MARGARET DELAND'S well-proved pen gives us a spirited sketch of a
modernist American woman in _The Rising Tide_ (MURRAY). I don't quite
know how this enigmatic sentence, which 1 have long puzzled over and
frankly given up, came to escape both author and reader: "Once Mrs.
Childs said to tell Fred her Uncle William would say it was perfect
nonsense." I feel sure it is not good American. However, _Freddy
Payton_ is a young girl who tells the inconvenient truth to everybody
about everything, and you may guess that such candour does not make
for peace. _Mrs. Payton_ elects to keep her idiot son in the house,
and _Freddy_ thinks an asylum is the proper place for him, and
says so. The late _Mr. Payton_ was a rake, and _Freddy_ derides her
mother's weeds on the ground that the widow is really in her heart
waving flags for deliverance, but daren't admit it. _Freddy_ offers
cigarettes to the curate, which is apparently a much greater crime
over there than here. _Freddy_ finally, carried along by the rising
tide, asks the man she loves to marry her, mistaking his friendship
for something stronger, and learn