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TEA, MILK, JAM, AMMUNITION, KNIVES, FORKS, REPEATING RIFLE, PICKLES, BARBED WIRE, &C., &C." * * * * * It would seem a far cry from the clash of armies to the romance of a honeymoon spent on a raft _de luxe_ drifting lazily down a river of Burma. That is the theme of _Love's Legend_ (CONSTABLE), by Mr. FIELDING HALL, author of _The Soul of a People_. But there may be a war of sex with sex scarcely less tragic than the wars of men with men (or brutes). The author shows us an oldish husband--a civil servant--who surmounts, with not too much indelicacy, the primary difficulty of his young wife's ingenuousness in relation to the sacrament of marriage. But a further and worse difficulty is waiting for him when he comes to deal with the incompatibility of the sexes in the matter of moral standards. The thing, of course, has been done once for all by LOUIS STEVENSON in _Virginibus Puerisque_. But he did it in essay form; here we have the piquancy of personal narrative and dialogue. Husband and wife in turn are responsible for the story, each assuming a partial attitude towards facts and opinions; or else it is one of his old friends (a source of foolish jealousy to the wife) who takes up the tale without warning when they meet at some riverside station. This means a pleasant variety of styles, and there is a certain childlike freshness about the method by which the husband adapts himself to his wife's intelligence, presenting his more difficult arguments in the form of fairy-tales--a habit which the author may, for all I know, have assimilated through intercourse with the local native. All goes badly, and things began to threaten an _impasse_, when one foggy night the raft is cut in two by a paddle-boat and the pair get separated and nearly killed. They are so pleased to be restored to one another alive that they tacitly agree to waive their differences. It is perhaps rather a puerile _denouement_, and not likely to be very helpful to the newly-wedded public. There must be very few couples who can count on having their elemental differences healed by means of a collision between a honeymoon raft and a paddle-steamer on a Burmese river. All the same I commend the book, for it has a charm of manner that will appeal to all. As for its matter, half of it will seem sound to you if you are a male, and most irritating if you are a female; and the other way about with the other half. Personally, being a
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