FROM POST TO FINISH.

Otago Witness, Issue 2401, 8 March 1900, Page 64

FROM POST TO FINISH.

By Hawj^ky Sjiaet. Melbourne : Ward, Lock, and Bowden, Dunedin : Whiteombe and Tombs.

A cheap edition of this popular racing novel by one of our best known sporting novelists is sure to prove welcome to a large section of^the novel-reading public. Cuthbert Elliston, the man of good birth and family, in whom a long course of reckless "extravagance, gambling, and dissipation has successfully eradicated every spark of honour, is the malign influence of the story. He is indirectly the cause of his cousin, Allister Rockingham's, death, for it is by his villainy that an " outsider " wins the St. Legei, and Allister Rockingham leaves the course a ruined man, to die wiuiin the year of a broken spirit. I'oung Gerald Rockingham, heir to nothing but an old name tarnished by his father's ruin, has long been sincerely attached to pretty Dollie Greyson, the daughter of a well-known Yorkshire trainer. Brought up to consider himself heir to ten thousand a year, Gerald Rockingham, fresh from Harrow, and waiting to go up to Cambridge as the representative of an honoured old county family, finds himself instead mourning his father's death, and his own ruin.

To earn his own living, that is what lies inexorably before him. But how? It is Dollie Greyson who suggests " as a jockey." So the identity of Gerald Rockingham, the ruined young squire of Cranley Chase, is lost in that of Jim Forrest, the young light weight, with nerves of steel and a hand like a charm upon bit and bridle. The position .is full of possibilities for a thoroughly good plot rich in racing incident, and the author has worked the vein before him with skill, vivacity, and that good local colour and technical knowledge which always mark the sporting novels of liawley Smart.

Gerald R-ockingham seems to the cynical, yet superstitious Cuthbert Elliston to become his evil star, and, indeed, events justify the premonition. Dollies advice, her courage, pride, and pluck, undoubtedly constitute her woruiy" to be the heroine of this or any other novel, and the male reader is inclined to envy young Rockingham his good fortune in being beloved by so charming a girl. Perhaps the most important; personage in the book is, after all, The Dancing Master, the racer whose splendid powers and fiendish temper render him a complete " Ignis Fatnis " to owner and backers alike. How the defeat of Elliston, the assured happiness of Gerald and Dollie, and the glory of The Dancing Master are all interwoven in one and the same well-connected series of plot and counterplot, it will inteiest the lover of racing novels to read for himself.