eing suddenly dragged. He spoke to Chang,
and the noise ceased. Then running up a short ladder which was
close to the door, he threw himself down on the straw and stared
up into the darkness, which to his aching eyes seemed spangled
with many colours. Presently he was startled by something warm
touching him on the face.

"'Who's there?' he called out.

"There was no answer, but the soft thing, something like a hand,
felt him cautiously and caressingly all over.

"'Oh, it's you, Chang, my boy, is it?' said Joe. 'What! are you
glad to have me, old chappie? No humbug about yer, are yer sure?
No lies?'"

The circus-business is employed again in the catastrophe: but, to my
mind, far less happily. In spite of very admirable writing, there
remains something ridiculous in the spectacle of an injured husband,
armed with a Winchester rifle and mounted on a frantic elephant,
pursuing his wife's lover by moonlight across an English common and
finally "treeing" him up a sign-post. Mrs. Woods, indeed, means it to
be grotesque: but I think it is something more.

The problem of the story is the commonest in fiction. And when I add
that the injured husband has been married before and that his first
wife, honestly supposed to be dead, returns to threaten his happiness,
you will see that Mrs. Woods sets forth upon a path trodden by many
hundreds of thousands of incompetent feet. To start with such a
situation almost suggests bravado. If it be bravado, it is entirely
justified as the tale proceeds: for amid the crowd of failures Mrs.
Woods's solution wears the singular distinction of truth. That the
book is written in restrained and beautiful English goes without
saying: but the best tribute one can pay to the writing of it is to
say that its style and its truthfulness are at one. If complaint must
be made, it is the vulgar complaint against truth--that it leaves one
a trifle cold. A less perfect story might have aroused more emotion.
Yet I for one would not barter the pages that tell of Joe Morris's
final surrender of his wife--with their justness of imagination and
sobriety of speech--for any amount of pity and terror.

A word on the few merely descriptive passages in the book. Mrs.
Woods's scene-painting has all a Frenchman's accomplishment with the
addition of that open-air feeling and intimate knowledge of the
phenomena of "out-of-doors" which a Frenchman seldom or never at