me-piece his admirers will find themselves on more familiar
ground--none other indeed than that well-known desert in which they have
enjoyed such delicious thrills in the same company already. When Mr.
HICHENS' characters get the sand in their eyes almost anything may be
expected of them. Here he has given us a new version of the ancient
scheme of two men and a woman, complicated in this instance by a cobra;
the problem being, whether a doctor should cure his wife's lover of a
snake-bite. More original is the longest story in the collection, one
called "The Lost Faith," an affair of mental healing and love and crime
too complex for compression. It is admirably told. It leads up to a
situation as novel as it is dramatic--the confession of a young fanatic,
who believes in a lady-healer so implicitly that he puts typhoid germs
into the drink of a celebrated general in order to provide her with an
impressive subject. As a sensation this wants some beating; though it
failed to shake my own preference for the other story, which you will
observe I have purposely left unnamed. You will, I hope, enjoy finding
it for yourself.

* * * * *

_Heritage_ (COLLINS) gives me much the same impression that one obtains
from the spectacle of a man wire-walking in a sack or painting pictures
with his toes--attempting, in short, any task under conditions of
the greatest possible handicap. That certainly is what Miss V.
SACKVILLE-WEST has been at pains to impose upon herself. With a
straightforward, simple and interesting tale and some considerable
gifts for reproducing character, she has deliberately sacrificed these
advantages by telling her story in the most roundabout and awkward
manner imaginable. The theme is the influence of heredity, as shown in
the working out of a strain of Spanish blood in a Sussex peasant stock,
the victims of this inconvenient blend being _Ruth_ and the young cousin
whom half-unwillingly she marries; with devastating results. _Ruth_, as
I say, was attracted to _Westmacott_ with only part of her being; the
better (or at least less Spanish) elements in her were employed in
making soft eyes at two other men, one of whom, _Malory_, is supposed to
relate portions of the affair to the quite superfluous outsider who
puts them down. This _viva-voci_ recital is subsequently rounded off
by _Malory_, in what is surely the least credible of all the unlikely
letters in fiction, nearly a hundred