s hat and coat under the wayside tree, and the
storm which prompts the son to don these garments, are all independent
circumstances, whose simultaneous occurrence, each at exactly the proper
time to cause the catastrophe, may justly be deemed a coincidence too
great for the purpose of good literature. In an artistically constructed
tale, the various situations all develop naturally out of that original
cause which in the end brings about the climax; a principle which, if
applied to the story in question, would limit the events and their
sequences to those arising either directly or indirectly from the wrong
committed by the father's enemy. Since there is no causative connection
between the immediate decision of the father to kill his foe, and the
developments or discoveries which enable the son to return, the
simultaneous occurrence of these unusual things is scarcely natural.
Superadded to this coincidence are two more extraneous events; the
rather strange presence of the hat and coat near the road, and the
timely or untimely breaking of the storm, the improbability indeed
increasing in geometrical progression with each separate circumstance.
It must, however, be admitted that such quadruple coincidences in
stories are by no means uncommon among even the most prominent and
widely advertised professional fiction-blacksmiths of the day. Mr.
Whittier's style is that of a careful and sincere scholar, and we
believe that his work will become notable in this and the succeeding
amateur journalistic generation. The minuteness of the preceding
criticism has been prompted not by a depreciatory estimate of his
powers, but rather by an appreciative survey of his possibilities. "Say,
Brother", by Mrs. Renshaw, is a poem describing life in the trenches of
the Huns. The metre is quite regular, and the plan of rhyming but once
broken. Mr. Porter's prose work; editorial, introductory, and narrative,
is all pleasing, though, not wholly free from a certain slight looseness
of scholarship. We should advise rigorous exercise in parsing and
rhetoric. "Respite", by Edgar Ralph Cheyney, shows real poetical genius,
and the iambic heptameters are very well handled, save where one
redundant syllable breaks the flow of the last line. Even that would be
perfect if the tongue could condense the noun and article "the music",
into "th' music".

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=The Tornado= for April constitutes the publishing debut of Mrs.