w York and London:
G.P. Putnam.]

Miss Harland's preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister
how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their
Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to 'bound
sermons and semi-detached tracts,' was enlivened by the _Works of
Hannah More_. She proceeds as follows:

'At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set
of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by
the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the
dear old home library.... The leaves of the book I held fell apart
at _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_.'

I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words
made me:

'The usher took six hasty strides
As smit with sudden pain.'

I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding,
their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian
garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.

Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of
Charlotte Bronte's mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of
_Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ might have grown up more like Hannah More
than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter
cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home
library, I might have read _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ and
_The Search after Happiness_ of a Sunday, and found solace therein.
But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with
the _Pilgrim's Progress_, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained
page of Mrs. Sherwood's _Tales from the Church Catechism_, and,
'more curious sport than that,' the _Bible in Spain_ of the
never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.

What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland's enthusiasm for
Hannah More's writings is that it expires with the preface. _There_,
indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:

'And _The Search after Happiness!_ You cannot have forgotten all of
the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the
joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every
few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals
flung down by the warm wind.'

This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both
Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in
_The Search after Happiness