THE BOOKFELLOW.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 113, 14 May 1910, Page 9

THE BOOKFELLOW.

m Written for The Post, by A. G. Stephens. (Copyright. — All Rights Reserved.) A LETTER FROM TASMANIA. O, friend, this mom a snow-white magpie flew From grey-dewed grass to gnarly applebough, And at the goodly omen swift to you My thoughts took wing — and they are with you now! What make we hero beside the Bounding I main In melancholy? Of a truth I pass My life in Georgian stillness, and am fain, Sweet, to recall when we were lad and lass. Do you remember Kibble's thin pure flow "Where that sad king was ta'en amid the shade, And how you wept for his far distant woe And life-blood shed by Gloster's ruthless blado? I think of odd strange things: has Lunestreet yet Its sign of grasshopper significant To childish eyes of terror? Is there set Still in old Friargate the elephant? That court so grimy in the silent light Of Sunday morn, through which we loved to 6tr»y To Trinity ! Do children clad in white Still thread its dimness, meeting Quaker grey? (The Trinity — can you forget the quaint And three-fold image of those youthful days? Not rigid now my Creed as firm bronze Saint, But soft as glory shot with golden rays: I bow before a Mind high, pure, and lone, Before a Love supreme in spite of death, The sense Virgilian^ the low gad moan Of Tintern, and' a Pentecostal Breath.) Ah! I can touoh you with a pleasing pain — God knows with simple things ! — the Christmas glow Of log and waxen lights, the ruddy stain At Christmas Eve upon the crunching snow. How gravely we went hand-in-hand to see The pig_ with oranged mouth, bedecked with flags, And sprigs of holly, and the Christmas tree, And heard- the stories of old Pendle hags! Does the Canal still slumber foul and dark Beneath the arched foundations? and the way Of ancient trams etill wander to the Park? The chains olank in my heart: Is all decay? . . . For joy give me at eve a silent room Whose hearth flames merrily in golden dance, A County's tale, and in the fire-lit gloom Will gather round the shades of old romance. The wind may sweep and rumble— l am deep In times gone by, faint and disconsolate, Unsealing histories of those who sleep By ohancel — wall — no longer passionate. The sunken gallery, the panelled! hall, The chamber with vert tapestry, the glade Beneath the lattice, by the fountain's fall, Sunny with visions that can never fade ! 0, friend, the charm behind the folio print, The copper-plates of rude and calm decay, The very leaves' aroma; — O the hint I know not what of age, so fresh, yet grey! Then bring my chain and in monastic nook, Or vaulted ohapel-aisle in fragrant dark, Bind me for ever bending o'er a book, Forgetful of the sun and rising- lark. Ah, no! I cannot leave my new-fledged' oak, My stocks and gillivers, my lupin's gold, My blushing roses, and the wild flower folk, And hawthorn globes just 'ginning to unfold. When falls in autumn-tide the English leaf, I'll walk among their rustling drift-B and feel As once we felt when youth played with fond grief, Before the darksome shadows 'gan to steal. . . My garden is not sweet as Cupid's Bower South of clear Thames, the haunt of moaning dove, Or quiet- Close of matted; leaf and flower, — But dear from hints of well-remembered love. And though no blackbird flutes, no nightingale When pools and isles of wandering purple light Fade in the passion of his ancient tale, Yet there are bird-notes, liquid, sunny, bright. . . Laden with wattle-bloom the children roam In scented twilight with soft little cries ; But think with changing feeling warm at home Of the wide bush through which the Right wind sighs. . . My thought is ever busy with the thought Behind the symbol: when a rose I see Perfect in form and ( colour, poet-wrought, I want to bow the head and bend the knee. . . In stately armour sheathed I am the man Hight Christian, above the darkening vale Where waite my enemy on dreadful van ; And I am Fearing by the River pale. . . But lighter shadeß haunt my old Rectory rooms, From Hades flocking to my homely fire— Ah ! could I sing their white and blushing blooms ! Not mine Apollo's laurel nor his lyre. . . Me count the singers worthy to receive Pure eongs alight with Austral morning dew; And dreaming o'er their Celtic names I leave The sunshine for the Past's charmed purple hue. I Of innocence his song beneath love's roof, Whose fragrant name a scent of briar flings; I Of echoes multitudinous of hoofs j On immemorial hills, another sings. A friend of Elia from- Temple place, Lives with tradition in unmemoried k>,nd6 : Whose name is redolent of forest grace Strikes Sealand lyre with pure ecstatic hands. And one who praising my regretful rhyme Seems — O sweet folly! — mouthed like Golden Bee Still making audible in southern clime The silent judgments of Melpomene. Thus here in isle of softly threaded blue, Where sounds in ears prepared love's flute always, — My shore Lavinian — I think of you And your young beauty of those English days. And as one dying on a foreign strand Sees through the open door his friends depart, Sloped on the wave, and yearns for that dear land He shall not know again — so longs my heart ! — James Ilebblethwaite. WANTED, A NEW ZEALAND NOVEL. The recurrence of Harold Bindloss's formula in "The Gold Trail" suggests how easily it might be applied to New Zealand. It is an excellent formula, followed in all Bindloss's later novels ; and Bindloss is a solid pillar of the circulating Libraries. "The Gold Trail" is a sound and interesting piece of fiction. Bindloss's English hero once more performs in British Columbisuthe labours of Heracles in. ord«r--to win hisladj; love;-*

but on this occasion she is no proud Englishwoman, but a Canadian with another kind of pride. The figures move in the open air, against a breezy background of scenery, and they move at a good gait, swinging between sentiment and derring-do. The British and colonial audiences are cunningly catejed for. It is Canadian air that breeds the man, but then his manhood is English. And the hero does what most men would like to do ; the heroine is what most women would like to be. There is no reason why a New Zealander, ingenious, aspiring, and literary, should not borrow the formula. New Zealand has not produced one sell-a-day novel as good as Bindloss's. Nor has Australia, excepting only the two owed to Clarke and Browne. Perhaps W. Satchell's come nearest to the desideratum; Edith Lyttleton's might come nearer still if they were not so false and tawdry. But Satchell has not Bindloss's pace ; his stories move too slowly and are too introspective. FIGHTING LITERATURE. The essential of successful current fiction is action; and Bindloss not only gives plenty of action, but he appeals to the most primitive instinct by making his action combative. All his heroes fight — fight circumstances and the other fellows till they get the girl. There is no better recipe for readers. And Bindloss's stories are of the present day, modern ; they show the thing that goes on. So the aspiring young New Zealander will not deal with the romance of Gabriel's Gully. He will take his English hero now, land him in Wellington by 1900, at farthest, and make his married fortune by 1910. How? That is for the young New Zealander to invent. Perhaps the well-mannered Engglishman will start with a co-operative gang on the railways, take a small contract, and persuade Mr. Millar to give him a tunnel like Arthur's Pass. Ihen he -will fight rocks and labourers. Perhaps he will go gold-digging, and find another Waihi. Ihen he will fight refractory ore. Perhaps he will invent a new way of making butter as cheaply as butter-and-moisture, and combine all the factories in one magnificent control. Then he will fight recalcitrant producers and London agents. Perhaps he will electrify the Lyttelton tunnel. Perhaps he will deepen the Auckland harbour. Perhaps he will breed sterilised oysters in Evans Bay. It doesn't ' matter what he does as long as it looks feasible to wit and grit, and as long as he fights,, fights, fights while he's doing it. The heroine will come to tour New Zealand with her father, modo Bindlossi, giving a pleasant chance to satirise the tourists. Ihe mixture is 5 per cent, commentary, 10 per cent, scenery, 25 per cent, sentiment, and 60 per cent, doing and fighting. THE 'ROMANCE OF REALITY. Of course Bindloss knows his prospecting, his railroading, his farming, of his own knowledge. The young Kew Zealander must know of his own knowledge, in order to give the requisite air of verisimilitude and bring the requisite conviction that such things can be. This knowledge given, there is no reason why a New Zealand Bindloss should not arise, just as good as the original. He will make money ! Bindloss's style counts. He omits rhetorical superfluities. So must the young New Zealander. Bindloss preserves a nice balance between narrative and dialogue. So must the young New Zealander. Bindloss relies on short, direct statements. So must the young j New 'Zealander. For youthful writers everywhere, Present tense, Indicative mood, And a. short sentence Make good! They do not make the best style, but their style is uncommonly clear and serviceable. • Bindloss's books give the romance of realism ; the plot never outrages possibilities, the details never go far from the fact. Hence Bindloss's colour of life, the noticeable vitality of his novels. The young New Zealander has to represent the thing that goes on under his nose, yet selecting and compounding so that, when it is seen at the romantic angle of the poet, the real will become a practical ideal. A HORRIBLE EXAMPLE. Young authors persist in looking into their heads and writing, instead of opening their eyes, looking at the life around them, and writing that. "But," wrote a young lady to whom I gave such counsel, "there is no life around me." "Then," said the pundit, "take a man, and put his acts and emotions under your pitiless microscope." And she did. "I'm engaged," she declared, "and I'll write him up." And she did ! It was a man to the life, with weekly progress reports that made three, four, five sketches of a sad and excellent truth for lovers. Deliberately the criminal inveigled the victim to take her driving, walking, moonlighting, then came hotfoot from the ny under the pin, and "wrote him up" — what he did, what he said, what he wore, what he smelt like — Flaubert surpassed ! Then, quite suddenly, the enthralling series ended. "We're going to a picnic at Lovers' Gully," wrote the ambitious authoress, "and he's quite wild. I'm sure he'll make good copy for next week." The good copy never came. Nothing came. I asked for an explanation. No answer. The rest was silence, as the poets say. Blank silence, sheer oblivion. It was all years ajp ; yet sometimes still in dreams and visions of the night I ponder my apt pupil in romantic realism, and ask vainly, "But why? And how?" The song the Sirens sang is not lost more completely than the answer to that solemn and portentous question (in italics) : "What happened at Lovers' Gully? ? ?" THE FORGER'S FIST. How would you detect forgery, supposing you lived in a land o£ finance where iorgers lurk, and occasionally leap? Would you rely on the unassisted mother-wit of the bank teller, or would you go scientifically to work, measure letters and spaces, scrutinise dots and crosses, tails and spurs, with scale, magnifying giass, and camera? In the latter case, "The Detection of Forgery," written by Douglas Blackburn and Captain Waithman Caddell, and just published by C. and E. Layton, of London, is your vade mecum to the swindler's disaster. The object of the book, its lessons and illustrations, is to help people who may be called upon to form an opinion as to the genuineness of signatures. Often, declare the authors, circumstances and signatures arise that demand "the serious consideration of business men," with a view to " taking further steps." The "serious" consideration of "business men" — piling Pelion upon Ossa to emphasise the gravity of the case, as if ever a really truly "business man" could be anything but "serious" — how significant ! And "taking further steps" — how darkly suggestive ! | The radical principle of the expert in handwriting is that a perfect pair does i not exist in Nature. No two men walk, talk, think, exactly alike. To each his idiosyncrasy, his mannerism, his little tic. And no two men write exactly alike. Every person whose handwriting has developed permanently has adopted some more or less distinctive peculiarities in forming the letters of which he is usually unaware. Dotting an i, crossing a t, are mechanical acts, performed unconsciously. How do you perform? Is your dot a point, or a jab, or a wiggle, or a dash? Does your cross ascend or descend or march level ? The expert looks for these unconscious signs, pictured in astonishing detail, and accumulates .them. When he accumulates a dozen resemblances, say, he has reduced to

zero the possibility of error between tw< examples of handwriting. MEN AND PENS. Different pens make no difference U the hand-prints on the paper, nor doet the change of forehand for backhand, The writer's tricks persist. The expert sees the same man in a different suit of clothes. Jones, with a thick pen, does not put a dot over an i where with a thin pen he put a dash. He does not turn a straight barred t into a looped t, noi does he alter his usual spacing of wordj and lines. Given a sufficiency of ma* terial, the forger is seen lapsing soonei or later into the tricks of his own hand. One signature may be more easily forged ; yet even here our authors bring consolation by saying that cheque forgery . is extremely difficult and rarely successful. Great frauds are usually I perpetrated by means of bills of ex« change, cradit notes, and suchlike docu« ments. \ And the best-intentioned forgers bluiu der. One signed a will with an anilina* copying pencil. Unluckily the will was dated years before aniline copying pen* cils were invented. Another dried thf writing on an alleged 17th centnry deed with blotting-paper. But in the 17th cen« tury_ blotting-paper was unknown, amf .writing was dried with sand, or with a powder called pounce, or with a powde< containing fine crystals of metal de-> signed to give a gloss to the ink. A' collector is mentioned who gave a goo<* price for a letter purporting to be writ* ten by Sir Humphrey Davy, in an em velope. But envelopes were unknowj* till 1840— thirty years later than the dat* of the letter. So Messrs. Blackburn and Caddell em .lighten us. They have chapters scrutinise me: the alphabet and its modes in de*. tail, chapters on erasing, on blotting* photography, and a score of devices fotf making the forger worthy of the "seri* ous consideration of business men, withl a view of taking further stens." Ii thera is anybody in New Zealand exposed t« the forger's risk, he will find "The De-, tection of Forgery" a literary shield and* a caligraphic buckler against the dastard foe.