il in the school of RIDER HAGGARD and LOUIS STEVENSON,
but chiefly of the former. It was a beastly day, snow falling, and
North-West-by-North wind howling, bitterly cold, and so," continued the
Baron, "I was reduced to _Zero_. The construction of the plot is clever, as
is also the description of a great fight, in the latter portion of the
story; but, as a whole, the story is irritatingly ill-written, and tawdrily
coloured, while italics are used to bring into prominence any description
of some strongly sensational situation."

Few things so annoying to me, personally, as the romancer speaking of his
chief puppets as "our friends." This LAWRENCE FLETCHER is perpetually
doing. Now his heroes are not "my friends," for, when I read, I am strictly
impartial, at all events, through two-thirds of the book, and, if I learn
to love any one or two (or more) of them, male or female, I should still
resent the author's presuming to speak of them as "our friends." To do so
from the first is simply impudent presumption on the part of the author, as
why, on earth, should he assume that his creations--his children--should be
as dear to us as they are to him?

No--"Our friends," so used, is a mistake.

The influence of RIDER HAGGARD is over the whole book, but in two instances
the author has been unable to resist close imitation, nay, almost quotation
of a well-known Haggardism, and so he writes at p. 130:--

"Just then a very wonderful and awful thing happened."

And at p. 197:--

"When suddenly, and without an instant's warning, a most awful
thing happened."

Both variations on a Haggardism, and both equally spoilt in the process of
transferring and adapting.

One sentence, the utterance of a Zulu chief, is well worth quoting, and it
is this:--

"But empty hands are evil things wherewith to face a well-armed
spook."

"The well-armed spook" is a joy for ever.

_"A great black man fleeted past the rocks."_ "Hum!" quoth the Baron,
"fleeted" is a new word to me. Not that I object to its invention and use
on that account; in sound and appearance it expresses no more than "sped,"
or, if pursuit is to be implied, "fled."

Here is something that this novelist having written may well lay to heart,

_"The man was as white-skinned as themselves, and judging from the
purity of his English, must have been at one time a British
subject."_

"Now," quoth the Baron, meditatively, "if purity of English, w