NEWS AND NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14145, 21 August 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

NEWS AND NOTES.

Some mystery and not a little romance have been wound about the early life of Sir Henry M. Stanley. The story of those days of struggle, as of his later days of struggle and success, is fully told in his forthcoming autobiography. We are told that in its pages he reveals his inner self and the motive power of his life. Lady Stanley is seeing the work through the press.

It seems that Mr. James Lane Allen's new story, " The Bride of the Mistletoe," is intended to be part of a trilogy. He announces that a second story of the same length, laid in the same house, will appear within a twelve-month. It will be called "A Brood of the .eagle," and there will be a third work, not fiction, "The Christmas Tree." The three works will complete each other, as they will complete a cycle of a theme.

Mr. William de Morgan's new and very long story, and Mr. Hall Game's " White Prophet,' which has been running a serial course in the Strand, are two of Mr. Heinemann's forthcoming novels. His circular does not say so, but perhaps it is to be assumed that they will each appear in two volumes. The plan of pricing a book according to its length is not an innovation, for that was the basics of the Unit Library, which scarcely succeeded in a commercial sense, although its contents were classics.

There has been a rumour that the Transvaal, or rather federated South Africa, may take over Rhodesia from the Chartered Company. * Meanwhile there seems to be no ground for it, but it gives interest to an announcement made by Messrs. Bell. They are publishing a work on Southern Rhodesia by Mr. Percy F. Hone. It will be the nrst history of Southern Rhodesia, and it is written from an entirely non-party standpoint. Its one object is to give an accurate account of the country and its inhabitants and resources.

Mr. S. R. Crockett, the novelist, has a little personal volume appearing with Mr. Alfred H. Hyatt, of the Cedar press, Enfield. It is entitled, "My Two Edinburghs," and is a memory sketch of Mr. Crockett's early life in Edinburgh. He says: — Thirty years ago I knew a boy of 15, who had strange thoughts and made curious observations. I have never met him since and suspect him of keeping out of my way—or, if not dead, dead at least to me. These are some of his reflections, and the curious thing is that, though " as different as different, we yet bore the same name, that long-legged, stalking, wonder-stricken boy of 15— I.

Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole has commenced a new novel. He lives in the country, where he finds it easier to write than in London. "I am Irish," he has been saying, "and I was born in Ireland, but I have French blood in me on my mother's side. She had been a great traveller in her youth', and I suppose I inherit from her the love of movement, the wandering instinct, that has led me half over the world, always with a book in my pocket." Mr. Stacpoole says the only book he has written from an" sort of notes taken with a pen is his latest one "Pools of Silence," which deals with the Congo.