STRONG MAC.

Otago Witness, Issue 2623, 22 June 1904, Page 76

STRONG MAC.

Br S. R. Crockett.

London and Melbourne : Ward, Lock, and i Co. Dunedin : Braithwaite"s Book Aicade. Readers who followed the varying fortunes of "'Strong Mac"' as the story ran its serial course through the popular pages of the Windsor Magazine will be glad to lefi-esh their fragmentary knowledge with, the more harmonious impressions left by the complete volume. Readers who eschew magazine serials on principle may with confidence — that i?, if they admire Crockett's work — order a copy of "Strong Mac.'' We are not. devoted admirers of Crockett's book.-s personally, and considered that he had well-nigh written his best, at anyrate ot the peasant novel — for such a book as "The Adventux-er in Spain" stands on a different plane — but in "Strong Mac" there is the same good stuff, the same vivid, sympathetic chax*acterisation, the same evidence of literary art, the same fine conception, of human xiature and keen sense of humouras charmed us in "The Stickit Minister," "Lochinvar," "Kit, Kenedy," and others of his novels. An indisputable charm, too, ia lent to this edition of "Strong Mac " by the fact that all the original illustrations by Maurice Gx-iffenhagen which appeared dui*ing its serial course in the Windsor ax*e retained. Briefly, for benefit of those who desire an inkling of the time, the place, and style of the story, it may be told that it is timed to run its course of village tragedy and comedy while Lox-d Wellington's gi'jat victories in Spain filled the cup of England's glory: that it is placed in the tiny Scottish village of Lowran, whose inhabitants present as varied and excellent a field for observation and portraiture as did our familiar friends of "The Sciekit Minister or "Kit Kennedy" ; and that the style is the style of Crockett's "kailyard novel " at its best. Never was more natural, iiujiisn, and pitiful character drawn than that of Donald Gracie, the village dominie. Son of an ancient family, educated for the Church — for whicli his excellent education and natural abilities admirably fitted him, — - the death of his young wife left him to fall a weak prey to the mean temptations^ ol the secret drunkard. Expelled from the Church, his identity concealed under a variation of name, his story unknown and unguessed at, the ex-clergyman, his normal content broken by passionate periods of remorse and l-egret, fills, as village dominie, aix important position in these village chronicles. Still more necessary to the plot of the stoi'y is ths only daughter of this old d-erelict, the fair and winsome Dora Gracie. About her circles the inner lile of the village school, ■where young men. of twenty, fill'ng men's places of strenuous toil on lonely and widely-scattered! farms throughout the summer months, spend the fallow winter months in slow and laborious study under the dominie's iron rule.

That vein of somewhat gruesome honror which is inseparable from Crockett's conceptioix of the necessary shadow is present in the character of the poacher Crob "M'Robb, who, battered and trodden well nigh out of human semblance under the brutal feet of Muckle Sandy Ewan, kills his tormentor, and crawls away into the rocky solitudes of the moors to live the life of a beast of prey. But humour, dry, honest, healthy, humour, is scattered like golden grain throughout the pages. And to those pages we heartily commend our readers.