f Nature under southern skies, the
principal characters are English, and in England is centred first and
last the dominant pathos of the story. A complete absence of dialect
from the novels helps to emphasise the author's slender use of
extraneous aids to interest.

The influence of Ada Cambridge's twenty-five years' Australian
experience is shown in her general outlook upon life, rather than in the
details of her work. The prevailing tone of her books is one of marked
cheerfulness, sincerity, and simplicity; she has a hearty dislike for
conventional stupidities, especially for the mock-modesty that stifles
honest sentiment; and she gives emphatic endorsement to the pleasant
dictum (which seems so much more feasible in sunny Australia than in
colder northern lands) that the second half of life is not less fruitful
and satisfying than the first.

As the general effect of Ada Cambridge's teaching, so far as it can be
gathered from her plots, and the few instances in which she has
permitted herself anything in the shape of didactic expression, is to
make us more patient with life's complexities and perceptive of its
compensations, and more content with whatever happiness may be drawn in
our way by the chain of accidents called Destiny, so do her principal
characters, in their foibles and their strength--in the little acts and
impulses which qualify alike their heroism and their baseness--tend to
make us more discriminative and charitable.

In almost every case they are strong studies from some point of view.
Of deliberate analysis there is very little; but there are numerous
realistic touches not commonly admitted in fiction, which, handled with
skill and insight, keep the character within the pale of common
experience and increase rather than alienate the reader's sympathy.
Thus, Richard Delavel's outburst of relief upon the death of his first
wife, so far from being vulgar and brutal, as it might have seemed in
other circumstances, recalls and emphasises the high sense of duty and
honour and the iron self-restraint which had enabled him to be in all
essentials a good husband for twenty-five years to a cold-hearted
creature, between whom and himself there had never been either common
interest or feeling, and for whose sake he had relinquished the woman
that would have been his real mate in intellect and sympathy. Delavel's
housekeeper, who is also a privileged friend, takes him to task for his
unseemly hurry to go in s