oquois toward the patriots of the
frontier--revenge for their losses at the battle of Oriskany--and ended
with the march of the militia and continental troops on Saratoga.

The third romance, as yet incomplete and unpublished, deals with the
war-path and those who followed it led by the landed gentry of Tryon
County; and ends with the first solid blow delivered at the Long House,
and the terrible punishment of the Great Confederacy.

The present romance, the fourth in chronological order, picks up the
thread at that point.

The author is not conscious of having taken any liberties with history
in preparing a framework of facts for a mantle of romance.

Robert W. Chambers.

NEW YORK, _May 26, 1904_.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.

* * * * *

WORKS OF ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.

IOLE

Colored inlay on the cover, decorative borders, head-pieces, thumb-nail
sketches, and tail-pieces. Frontispiece and three full-page
illustrations. 12mo. Ornamental Cloth, $1.25.

Does anybody remember the opera of The Inca, and that heart-breaking
episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his
professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his
middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practice?

If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this:

"It was in bleak November
When I slew them, I remember,
As I caught them unawares
Drinking tea in rocking-chairs."

And so he talked them to death, the subject being "What Really Is Art?"
Afterward he was sorry--

"The squeak of a door,
The creak of a floor,
My horrors and fears enhance;
And I wake with a scream
As I hear in my dream
The shrieks of my maiden aunts!"

Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable
pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their
polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to
be wedded to his particular art)--I repeat, it is very dreadful to
suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked
to death.

But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the
trousers of the prophet are patched with stained glass, and it is a day
of dinkiness and of thumbs.

Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: "Art talked to death shall
rise again." Let us also recollect that "Dinky is as dinky does;