NEW BOORS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15482, 13 December 1913, Page 4 (Supplement)

NEW BOORS.

" The Honourable Mr. Tawnish' —by Jcffery Farnol (Sampson, Low, Marston, London ; Robertson, Melbourne). The clean, strong adventure of Jeffcry Farnol's work is attractive to all readers who like a novel, and though this of " The Honourable Mr. Tawnish" is far too short, it retains all of his wholesomeness as a fietionist. On first sight, with the largo type in which the publishers have set it, it appears to be a book for children. But it is really a story of the clever outwitting of three simple old gentlemen of a century since by a man who appears to them nothing but a little dandv. He, the dandy, has sued for the hand of Penelope, tho daughter of Sir John Chester, and the beloved of his two old friends, Bentley and another Dick, who tells the tale. Having set .Mr. Tawnish to do what they consider three impossible tasks, he surprises them all by accomplishment, and then appears before them, married to Penelope; and more, not Mr. Tawnish at all, but the young man whom of all others they would have selected for her hand.

" Man and Woman"— L. G. Moberly (Methuen, London).—The authoress sustains her reputation as a writer of pleasing fiction .11 this novel of " Man and Woman." Incidentally, she insists upon the opinion that there is no question of woman as against man, that "the woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink together." But. as Kit Fraser, an artist " with a vaulting ambition," is convinced that they do, and that man is rather a beast at the best, an old lady, Aunt Delight, sets out to convince her of error. When Muriel Denstone, Kit's friend is jilted, and the artist, grows bitter, the old lady sends both the girls out to the Durbar. On the ship the artist meets a man who interests her, and on her return while staying at Cannes, she happens to temporarily nurse a woman whom she hates. Finally when her. ideas are all somewhat upset, and she realises that she has allowed herself to fall in love with the man who interested her, the man appears and makes similar confession., So she arrives in England engaged to marry one of the despised creatures, and Aunt Delight finds again her lover of 25 years ago.

" Our Eternity"by Maurice Maeterlinck (Methuen, London)"— Maeterlinck wrote some time ago an essay on " Death." The subject interested him, and he continued to probe into the life after death. In this volume h.s researches are continued, and he calls upon authorities such as Sir Oliver Lodge and others of the Society for Psychical Research to supply all the information that is at present granted to us. He has to admit himself in the end puzzled and baffled. The dead people who, having promised to return to earth in order to give the information by means of mediums, utter meaningless speoches, avoiding the desired explanation, and only proving the reality of their being by personal idiosyncrasies, such as that of Myers, who insisted upon notes being taken. Always when questioned about the life hereafter, they become hazy, evasive unsatisfactory ; and Maeterlinck having covered roughly the ground of to-day's sincere investigators, has to leave the question to resign himself to " living in the incomprehensible, but .to ' rejoice that w.e ca'nnot go out of it.'' He is sure that for some time after death the spirits hover round with a ■ modified consciousness of what is happening, but he inclines to the supposition that their intellectuality has become that of themselves in their dying state, and not in that of their normally healthy existence. , ; - \

,<', Highways and Byways in the Border"— by Andrew and John Lang (Macmillan, J London). The name of the authors is sufficient to entice one's interest in another of these books of a charming series. ~ And ''.. delightfully illustrated as it is the volume still gains :in value. Hugh Thomson's ; : : sketches, rough crayon ones, are excellently ',; reproduced, and of themselves give ai\ air :, of extreme naturalness to " Highways and '.'Byways." And the brothers have between them garnered an immense mass of tore . '■; about the 'countryside, though Mr. John ■ Lang; modestly disclaims bis share of it > in the following preface— > "At the time of his death, my brother and I.had; proceeded but a little way in '/this task which he and I began together; ■.< and I must frankly own my inability to ''' cope with it on the lines which he would • doubtless have followed. It is probable, '■: for example, that his unrivalled knowledge ..of the memories, legends,' ballads, and i nature of the border would have led him . to ; : show various important events in a light different from that in which my less 'intimate acquaintance with the past 'has enabled me to speak of them; whilst as .regards the ballad literature of the border, ;. ' I cannot pretend to that expert knowledge ' which he possessed. To him every burn and stream, every glen and hill, of that pleasant land' was full of ballad, notes, • borne out of long ago. To- the end they echoed and re-echoed in his heart, and' no : voice ever spoke more eloquently as that ■j of Tweed, bv whose banks, indeed, in a spot greatly lovjd, had it been permitted, ; he would fain have slept his long sleep." Be that; is it may, Mr. Lang has com- , piled a very interesting; book, which shows ;■ deep knowledge : of' the countryside and of its -old traditions and inhabitants. Not • the least interesting of its chapters are ;' .those- dealing with ■ Abbotsford" and its ;'owner. Sir, Walter Scott. And he makes ■ \an eloquent plea for the purification of the stream of the. border, too often, evi- , dently, polluted by the growing commer-K-cialism of modern manufacture.

"Sowing Clover"_by George Wouil :-.? -.(Long, London)— one of those novels of . ■; midland life in England, which are attrac- '* tive by reason of the fine field they give ;', "for the study of human nature. It is such work .as Arnold Bennett delights in. ' George Wouil lays claim to no other writ.'ings, but his work offers abundance of ■;. promise .of good .things. The fault of '.' "Sowing Clover" is that often found in .-writers who have yet much to say—a then- : dency to skip over the gTound rather too , quickly, when one would have enjoyed /a little more. But he nevertheless serves his purpose of delineating truly and well the struggles jind final success of a cobbler; he introduces pathos and romance round Alice, Wittongate's wife, and perturbation as to the son whose feet are set upon an easier path than John Wittongate's. The young man proves himself strong enough to make one hope that his father's character is repeated in him. He astonishes his father by faying that he has two hundred pounds to start married life. Only the reader knows that it was the result of a fortunate gambling incident. "It was a long time before Claude's mother was convinced. ' Thank God !' said she at last,' I've often been anxious about him J' " "' So have I,' said John gaily. ' But now he's going to be a credit to us. We'll get him married and over at Cooknall. Rosie '11 manage him all right. She's coming over to-morrow.' " John put out the light. For some time there was silence. , "' Do you remember how we started in, -' yield Street at Bradmill said a voico in the darkness. "' Yes, the poky kitchen, where the fire always smoked when we hadn't the draw tin on,' said Alice. . "' We had a patchwork •quilt, you re- • member.' "Silence again. .' "'The night I had the sack. You le•member. You told me. You knowClaude.' " John felt an arm steal over his shoulder. "There was a sound of a kiss in tho . darkness." "The Maze of Scilly"—by E. J. Tiddy (Long, London)—is a collection of stories ~ of shore 'life about the Scillies. Many of ' its tales are of plunder and of those people .:.. who were known, as wreckers. " The Ring" is an especially forcible one of a « woman, Huldah. who earned much by the robbery' of dead bodies. ' This trade, a ~ gruesome thing in. itself, in her hands ac- .-. quired other horrors.' Having found the ■bodyof man fastened to a spar, she .-; tries to remove a ring from his finger. '

"Again she pulled at the ring,, jerking the finger . almost from it* socket, endeavouring to draw the gold over the bruised joint. But the finger was so swollen and cut that the ring would not move. Then Huldah, the wrecker, had becomo impatient. Stooping ' over the man's prostrate • figure she had caught the circlet of gold between her teeth, trying to draw th- jewel from the hand, Still the gold would not move. - " Then the'brute within the woman arose and she pulled fiercely.. and with her teeth at the gold as if she were a tigress over her prey.. She uttered strange, snarling sounds, and bit in an inhuman way as it the taste of blood had touched the beast nature, and she must kill and gloat over, her prey. Then the figure that had been so still since she had discovered it on the edge of the deep stirred ever so slightly, and the man whom the woman had supposed to ho dead opened his eyes and looked pleadingly at her. " At first 6ho had started back in horror: but the brute was now foremost in the woman, and her lust for the jewel the sen had cast up was stronger than her humanity. Reaching down quickly sho had loosened her heel tap. A sharp blow on the man's forehead and he lay lifeless. With fierce haste and brutality tho woman bit at the ring and the flesh. As the teeth met and parted again the ring slipped from the mutilated hand, rolling over the pebbles at her feet. Greedily she had seized her spoil. And then sho spurned the dead man with her foot." The cleverness of the book lies in its portrayal of such characters as reveal themselves in the tales •of storm-bound islands, of plunder and greed ; and of the mastery ever all else of the tempest on the sea.