on (reversed) in _Miss Elizabeth's Prisoner_. It is
only a deserved tribute to the skill with which Mr. JEFFERSON CARTER
has told this adventure of his namesake to admit that I am left with an
uncertainty, not usual to the reviewing experience, whether it is in
fact a true or an imagined affair. In any event its development follows
a well-trodden path. We have the captive, jealous in honour, susceptible
and exasperatingly Quixotic, doubly enchained by his word and the charms
of his fair wardress; the lady's conspicuous ill-treatment of him at
the first, a slight mystery, some escapes and counterplots, and on the
appointed page the matrimonial finish that hardly the most pessimistic
reader can ever have felt as other than assured. Fact or fiction, you
may spend an agreeable hour in watching the course of _Captain Carter's_
courtship overcoming its rather obvious obstacles.

* * * * *

Because I have so great an admiration for their beneficent activities, I
have always wanted to meet a novel with a lot about dentists in it,
and now Miss DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON, in _The Tunnel_ (DUCKWORTH), has
satisfied my desire. Dentists--a houseful of them--spittoons, revolving
basins; patients going upstairs with sinking feelings; wondering at the
pattern on the wallpaper; going down triumphant. Teeth. Appointment
books. Dentists everywhere. This is not a quotation, but very like
one, for Miss RICHARDSON affects the modern manner. Though one of the
dentists is quite the most agreeable person in the book, he isn't the
hero, because the author is much too clever to have anything of the
sort. Her method, exploited some time ago in that remarkable book,
_Pointed Roofs_, is to get right inside one _Miriam Henderson_ and
keep on writing out her thoughts with as little explanation of her
circumstances as possible, so that _The Tunnel_, to anyone who has
missed the earlier books, must be very nearly unintelligible. Even the
sincere admirer of Miss RICHARDSON'S talent will begin to wonder how
many more books at the present rate of progress must be required to
bring _Miriam_ to, say, threescore years and ten. My own belief is that
if her creator is ever so ill-advised as to put her beneath a 'bus or
drop her down a lift-well, she herself will be gone too; and for that I
should be sorry, since I agree with almost all the nice things Miss MAY
SINCLAIR says of the earlier books in an appreciation here reprinted
from _