ESAU.

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

ESAU.

By Joseph Hockixg,

Dunedin : Braithwaite's Book Arcade. London and : Ward, Lock, and Co. A Cornish .story, where the sound of the mine-stanips grinding the tin ore to powder, the free breath of the wide, rolling moors, rhe far-off sough of the sea surges beat through the simple record: the story of a modem Esau, one who, cmid the everyday surroundings of modem country life, veiiiles once more the isolation of the Esau of old. Banished from home, disinherited: of his father, this Esau has fallen to tha very dregs of life, and is content, like the fiodigal of old, 10 "jail his belly with the hu-ks which the swine did eat/ Nor is there anything novel in the cause of his reckla^s dow^iill, for it is nothing more original than the love of a woman : a ben's love, -\\,ld, instant, unreasoning, aduiincr, for a beautiful gypsy, to whom he had no sooner declared his" passion than she is lost to him — lost in a single night beyond his power to trace thiou^h tVo Such is the story which the vi om and reckless tramp tells to Joshua Polskiuuy, the local preacher, and Mary, his wife. Homespun material this, but the hedcleu grey of the warp is lightened by bnllL'nt siken threads of romance, spun fiom the beauty of the Spanish gypsy. Fxancesaca Seriglia, and her stran&e history.

A second story, "St. Issey," divides the book with "Esau," and by some readers may be preferred, since the characters are people ot that, class of country gentlefolk whose life histories appeal more easily to the popular taste than do village chronicles, however real. " St. Issey " may be described as a pleasantly melodramatic love story of modern country life, much enhanced by its background of that beautiful Cornish land and seascape of which the author knows every delicate gradation of sound and colour.