rresistible
piece of convincing impossibility you have read for ages. I decline to
struggle with any transcription of the plot. On the wrapper you
will observe the woman stepping bodily out of the picture, like the
ancestors in the whisky advertisement; this, however, is a symbolic
rather than an actual presentment. But there is plenty without it:
a rightful heir, mountain castles amid the eternal snows, a villain
(with sorceries), half-a-dozen attempted murders and the most
hair-lifting duel imaginable. Soberly considered the whole business is
a riot of delirium, belonging flagrantly to that realm where all the
world's a screen, and all the men and women merely movies. But the
unexpected charm of the book is that with the possible exceptions
noticed above) it is told with a touch of distinction, even of
subtlety, that invests its wildest audacities with an atmosphere of
fantastic truth. In short, if Mr. G.F. TURNER has done nothing else he
has at least enabled the fastidious to enjoy the thrills of a shocker
while retaining their self-respect.

* * * * *

In the first of the three stories, each about a hundred pages in
length, which make up _Gold and Iron_ (HEINEMANN), it is hard to
escape the conviction that Mr. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER between the lines,
"So you thought that CONRAD was the only JOSEPH who could throw a
man and woman together on a mysterious coast in the most strangely
romantic circumstances, and provide a thoroughly groolly scrap into
the bargain. Well, here's another little _Victory_ for you." He
seems definitely to challenge that air of the extraordinary and the
inevitable combined which Mr. CONRAD so subtly conveys. It is a big
effort, and I don't feel that the author quite brings it off, yet I
cannot think of anyone but Mr. CONRAD who would have come nearer to
doing so, and the fight in the dark in this story is one that even
after the War will make a reader catch his breath for half-a-dozen
pages at least. In the second and third stories, which actually deal
with gold and iron (the first of the three is called "Wild Oranges,"
though perhaps "Blood Oranges" would have been a better title),
the writer returns to a happier _metier_, and deals with an America
remarkably interesting and wholly novel to me, an America where
foundries and railways are in their infancy and crinolines are worn.
Saloons, bowie knives and bags of gold-dust are all too familiar to
us, but who, o