BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2086, 15 February 1894, Page 20

BOOKS.

Adventures in Mashonaland. By Two Hospital Nurses — Rose Blennerhassett andLucySLEBMAN. — Macmillan's Colonial Library. Dunedin : Jame3 Horsburgh. This is one oC the most entertaining books we have read for a long time, and we were sorry to find ourselves so quickly at an end with it. The story of adventure is told by the first-named of the two ladies, Miss Rose Blennerhassett, but a fair share of the glory is allotted to her companion, Miss Sleeman. There was really a third lady, but she took so unkindly to the rough conditions of hospital life in Mashonaland that she married the doctor and soon left for another " sphere." We are given to understand by the writer of this bright narrative that travelling in Mashonaland is now a very simple affair, entailing little privation or hardship of any kind ; but as recently as 1891, when their plucky expedition was undertaken, travel in that part of Africa was a very tough job indeed. To those who enjoy a stirring narrative of roughing it in the bush — of perils by flood and " veldt," from alligators and devouring lions, of good-humoured endurance of the innumerable hardships of pioneering, and plucky contrivance in overcoming them, — we can recommend with all confidence this latest addition to the colonial library. Miss Blennerhassett and her companion first go out to Johannesburg, in South Africa, to nurse typhoid patients in that town, having had previous experience in hospital nursing in England. From Johannesburg they proceed to Kimberley, and are just on the point of le'.urning to England when they find themselves in treaty with Dr Knight Bruce, Bishop of Mashonaland, who has a project of establishing mission hospitals in his new diocese, and wishes to take skilled nurses along with him. The delays and disappointments, the sojourns here, the stoppages there, the navigation of the Pungw6 river in a craft where they cannot move their limbs, their dealings with native?, their casual encounters witii Europeans, English or Portuguese, their weary marchings through bush, plain, and swamp — all form a very interesting and not too lengthy story. Hiss Blennerhassett is very free in her descriptions of the people she meets, and we hope that some of them may approve of their portraits when they see themselves as this lady saw them. S.«meof them, from the kindnesses they showed to the two ladies, deserved at lea'it to have beon spared the mention of their names. On the other hand, if Miss Blennerha«sett is a little unkind at times to some of the characters who get into her story, she is generous in her praise of others. She appears to have been, like most people, subjugated by the personality of Mr Cecil Rhodes, who visited her hospital when he was in Mashonaland. When eventually the nureea reach their destination it is to hear from the bishop that he has decided not to establish a missioo_hospilal, but to place them in one which the " Chartered _Com.o~iiy- I! - / ~ would build. 4t last,' after meeting and overcoming a good many difficulties, they are duly established in huts; and at the end of two years, when other nurses come from England to relieve them, the new arrivals fiad a fairly comfortable hospital ready for them to take over. This is how they describe the small beginnings of their hospital enterprise :—": — " Our encampment was enclosed by a low wall of loosely piled stones, inside which we were assured no wild beast would dare to penetrate. We firmly believed this, and felt quite safe till an enterprising hyaena tried to enter our store hut, where a piece of an ox was suspended from the roof awaiting to be consumed. I consider it a special providence that no wild creatures burst into our sleeping huts. We had no doors, only a mat hanging before the opening. Many a night did we lie awake in terror, listening to the strange uncanny noises of the veldt, and imagining every sort of terrible possibility. We tried to overcome tbese terrors, with but indifferent success ; aud I cannot say that we even became acca3tomed to the neighbourhood of wild beasts." Several good stirring " lion " stories are told, most of them at second - hand, all seemingly tending to prove that the lion is not the coward he is represented to be by modern travellers, but will, under the stimulus of an empty stomach, pass even through the fire and carry off his man. Nor are the plucky nurses without their own fir3t-hand experience of lions. They were assured on the best authority that the roar of a lion had nevt-r been heard in New Umtali, as their locality was called. Bnt presently the settlement was in a commotion — more particularly the horse and mule part of it, — for lions were upon it, making nightly raids. The brute* attacked the horses even in broad daylight, and lion spoors became plentiful in the settlement. " Alarmed by the nightly raids that had been made on the cattle, the natives kept a bright fire in their huts all night. One of them was making it up, when the whole party was roused by the wellknown pig- like grunt of a hunting lion. Whilst they huddled together, the thatch wall was torn aside, and the head of a lion forced through the opening. His jaws were open ; the huge cavity showed red in the firelight, which lit up his gleaming teeth and cruel yellow eyes. With one accord the boys burst into the wails and shrieks that had roused U3 and the police camp, thereby scaring off the lion." We incline to think tbat Miss Blennerhassett serves up her lions with a considerable amount of dressing. Of course we cannot doubt that in Mashonaland lions do stick their heads through thatch walls and frighten natives ; but we take leave to doubt; whether natives in the circumstances are in a condition to seize, in such minute detail, all the picturesque points in the situation — " the huge cavity showing red in the firelight, whifih lit up his gleaming teeth and cruel yellow eyes." To us it reads like a clever blending of Mashonaland and the Zoo. However that may be, there was for ten days a reign of terror in Umtali. One night matters came to a crisis, when the lions forced their way into a cattle kraal behiud one of the houses. "The terrified cattle stampeded, their assailants chasing them through the streetß. The noise was tremendous. Frightened faces appeared at

windows, and rifles were discharged, but c he lions paid no attention. They killed two oxen — one in tho high street, one near the oven of oar friend the baker — besides badly mangling several others. This state of things could no longer be borne. One of the townsfolk, a good shot and clever hunter, took some natives with him, and followed up the fresh 'spoor,' which led into the bush behind the township. After walking some hours they entered a small open glade, and there before them stood lion and lioness. A shot killed the former, his raate escaping into the undergrowth." Undoubtedly Miss Blennerhassett makes very good use of her materials. Marion Bardic : A Story Without Comment. By F. Marion Crawford. Macmillan's Colonial Library. Dunedin : Jaa. Horsburgh; Wise, Caffin, and Co. Why this, more than any other of his book?, should be described by Mr Crawford as a " Story Without Comment " we have not been able to discover. It may be due to this absence of comment that this is the least interesting of Mr Crawford's stories we have yet read. It is full of flippant "chaffing" conversation, clever enough of its kind, but tiresome, and, after a little, exasperating. The moral of the story — if Mr Crawford has ever any such Philistine intention as to point a moral — is tbat in America, in respect of marriage conventions, there is a very considerable difference between tweedledum and tweedledee. Say, for example, that a woman marries the wrong man — a scoundrel — who ultimately becomes a convict, though he manag6S by flight to escape a prison. The question is how this woman is to retrieve her error, get rid of her scoundrel husband and marry the right man, who is ready at band, having been dangling at her apron string during her married life? There are two possibilities. The husband may die by his own hand or by any other means, in which case Mr Bight may step in and marry the widow, without any social blemish to either. This is Tweedledum, aud is highly honourable to all concerned. The alternative is that the scoundrel husband should not die, but persist in living. But a divorce is a simple matter in the States: and the wife may proceed with ease and certainty to free herself by this means, and so in due time marry Mr Right. This, however, may not be : it is Tweedledee, and would bring dishonour to the new husband. Hence weeping, wailing, tragic abnegation, equally tragic entreaty, despair — until, presto I the god descends from the machine, and shows that there is no cause to grieve ; for, all the time, the state of tho case has been not tweedledee but tweedledum. It is clear from Mr Crawford's novt 1 that married women have very nice consciences in the States. The Counte&s Madna. By W. E. NORRIS. London : William Heinemann. Dunedin : Wise, Caffirj, and Co. In 'any novaL^rlttSa by this author on« is alwayß_^SAire to find clever and piquant pietu'res of society, English or Continental. The Countess Radna is a study of un-English character. When an English and somewhat John Bullish piivate gentleman and member of Parliament marries a fascinating and much emancipated Austrian lady of high rank, the resulting incongruities are likely to be of interest. John Bull, the husband, loves blue books is in a hurry to be a Cabinet Minister, has a serious sense of the duties of a country gentleman and a large e3teem for respectabilities — besides having a mother and sister as eminently respectable as himself. The lady, of much higher rank than her husband, and with enormous, wealth entirely at her own disposal, has decidedly un-Eng-lish tastes and notions. She loves pleasure and does not care a fig for respectability, except indeed tbat she detests it ; she is a sceptic in religion, and lays little stresu on the sanctity of marriage, though sbo is never unfaithful to her husband. These two are very much in love to begin with. By-and-bye the husband's passion is pretty well smothered by bis sense of the proprieties, to say nothing of his wife's difficult disposition. The wife, however, continues so much in love with her husband that at last she runß away from him, sets up a separate establishment in Paris, and sends over an Italian acquaintance to England to pull her husband's nose. When the countess is on her deathbed the husband and wife square matters up, and tlte husband discovers, when ie Is too late, that when his wife most desired his nose to be pulled it was then she loved him best. She desires him to marry the other woman (for of course there is another), and this he dutifully does at a decent interval after his first wife's demise. Such i 3 the general scheme of this novel, and it is worked out by Mr Norris in a very clever and entertaining fashion. Mr Norris has a shrewd eye for character, and he can make his charactars t peak to each other in a natural way. No one who reads this novel i 3 likely to think any of its pages dull.