ach is interesting in its way, and
each true to the author's typical idea, which is to discover to his
readers some heroic quality in unheroic human beings which transforms
their whole lives before our eyes.

Mr. Thompson on his title-page announces himself as the author of two
novels, "A Tallahassee Girl" and "His Second Campaign," both of which we
read with pleasure, and this impression led us to turn hopefully to a
third by the same hand. "At Love's Extremes" does not, however, take our
fancy. If the author undertook to discuss a complex problem seriously,
he has failed to make it clear or vital to the reader; and if the
various episodes of Colonel Reynolds's life are to be passed over as
mere slight deviations from the commonplace, we can only say that we
consider them too unpleasant and abhorrent to good taste to be imposed
upon us so lightly. There are also points of the story which seem to
mock the good sense of the reader. Has the author considered the state
of mind of a young widow who has heard that her husband has been
murdered in a street-brawl in Texas, who has mourned him for years, and
then, after yielding to the solicitations of a new suitor and promising
to marry him, learns from his own lips that it was his hand (although
the act was one of self-defence) which sent her husband to his tragic
death? Mr. Thompson seems to violate the sanctities and the proprieties
of womanhood in allowing the widow, after a faint interval of shock, to
pass over this fact as unimportant. This situation has, of course, its
famous precedent in the scene in which Gloster wooes and wins the Lady
Anne beside her murdered husband's bier; but that is tragedy, and we
moderns are, besides, more squeamish than the people of those mediaeval
times. In this story the situation becomes more logical, even if more
absurd, after the return of the husband who was supposed to have been
murdered. With a good deal of effort to show powerful feeling, the
characters in the book are all automatons, who say and do nothing with
real thought or real passion. The vernacular of the mountaineers seems
to have been carefully studied, and is so thoroughly outlandish and so
devoid of fine expressions that we are inclined to believe it more
accurate than the poetic and musical dialects which it is the fashion to
impose upon our credulity. But it must be confessed that, with only his
own rude and pointless _patois_ in which to express himself, the
Southern