ry than by the profoundly moving and poignant picture that
Miss BETHAM-EDWARDS has drawn of life in the Reichsland under the
increasing burden of Prussian tyranny. It is a picture that one feels to
be absolutely true. The author writes of what she knows. This Alsatian
family--old _Jean Barthelemy_, the city father, crushed and embittered
by the fate of his loved Mulhouse; his two daughters and the circle of
their friends within the town--all live and move and look longingly
towards the West, as so many others must have done these forty and odd
years past. The plot, what there is of it, concerns the clandestine love
of _Claire_, the petted younger daughter of the Gley house, for an
officer in the conqueror's host, whom she had met during a visit to
Strasburg. _Claire_ marries her _Kurt_, a shady worthless knave, and, as
the book ends with the outbreak of war, is left to an unknown fate. Very
stirring are the chapters that tell of the tumult of emotion that broke
loose when the French guns were heard in Mulhouse; though here--as in
all those war stories whose only satisfactory end is the final confusion
of Kaiserdom--one feels that there is a chapter yet to be added. Miss
BETHAM-EDWARDS writes with all the vigour (I might add all the
garrulity) of intense personal feeling. Her book, as a race study, is a
real contribution to the literature of the War.

* * * * *

These are days in which some measure of sacrifice is rightly considered
the common duty of everyone, so long as it is sacrifice with an object.
Perhaps this consideration gives me less patience with the preposterous
kind, which, as a motive in fiction, usually consists in the hero
inviting all and sundry to trample upon his prospects and reputation.
This is what the chief character in _Proud Peter_ (HUTCHINSON) did. He
began by allowing it to be supposed that he was the father of his
brother's illegitimate child, the bright peculiar fatuousness of which
pretence was that thereby the said brother was enabled to marry, and
break the heart of, the heroine, whom, of course, Peter himself adored.
Also, many years after, when the child, now an objectionable young man,
nay more, an actor, was pursuing another heroine with his unwelcome
attentions, he very nearly spiked _Peter's_ guns, on being threatened,
by exclaiming, "I am thy son"--or words to that effect. Fortunately,
however, there existed, as I had somehow known would be the case, a