ntain-top.

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_Peregrine in Love_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is a story whose sentimental
title does it considerably less than justice. It gives no indication of
what is really an admirably vivacious comedy of courtship and intrigue,
with a colonial setting that is engagingly novel. Miss C. FOX SMITH seems
to know Victoria and the island of Vancouver with the intimacy of long
affection; her pen-pictures and her idiom are both of them convincingly
genuine. The result for the reader is a twofold interest, half in seeing
what will be to most an unfamiliar place under expert guidance, half in the
briskly moving intrigue supposed to be going on there. I say "supposed,"
because, to be frank, Miss FOX SMITH'S story, good fun as it is, hardly
convinces like her setting. You may, for example, feel that you have met
before in fiction the lonely hero who rescues the solitary maiden, his
shipmate, from undesirable society, and falls in love with her, only to
learn that she is voyaging to meet her betrothed. At this point I suppose
most novel-readers would have given fairly long odds against the betrothed
in question keeping the appointment, and I may add that they would have won
their money. Not that _Peregrine_ was going to find the course of his love
run smooth in spite of this; being a hero and a gentleman he had for one
thing to try, and keep on trying, to bring the affianced pair together, and
thus provide the tale with another than its clearly predestined end. Of
course he doesn't succeed, but the attempt furnishes capital entertainment
for everybody concerned, and proves that Mr. Punch's "C.F.S." can write
prose too.

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The title of _Gold Must be Tried by Fire_ (MACMILLAN) might be called
axiomatic for the precise type of fiction represented by the story.
Because, if gold hadn't to be tried by fire, you might obviously marry the
hero and heroine on the first page and save everybody much trouble and
expense. Mr. RICHARD AUMERLE MAHER, however, knows his job better than
that. True, he marries his heroine early, but to the wrong man, the Labour
leader and crook, _Will Lewis_, who vanishes just before the entrance of
the strong but unsilent hero, only to reappear (under an alias) in time to
get shot in a strike riot. Mr. MAHER'S book comes, as you may already have
guessed, from that great country where they have replaced alcohol by sugar,
and where (p