THE POOR PARSON.

Otago Witness, Issue 2808, 8 January 1908, Page 86

THE POOR PARSON.

By Steele Rxtdd.

\ Sydney: N.S.W. Bookstall.

Steele Eudd's books are too well known in Australasia to need any description as to style and tone here. Suffice it to say that "The Poor Parson" -is the hardworking, unselfish, gentle incumbent of a scattered parish peopled by such types of out-back settlers as Steele Rudd has depicted in- "Our Selection," "Sandy's Selection," etc.. The constant prefix of the word '^poor" throughout the book is an error in literary art which becomes absolutely irritating, deprives the conjunction "poor parson" of the pathos and dignity which should -be conveyed, and reduces it to a kind of puerile jest. In a long series of episodes of pioneer life, each containing some humorous incident, the parson makes the connecting link, since all these really quaint happenings are either

| personal experiences, or at any rate are 1 closely bound up with the exercise of his ' clerical profession. I Personally, it is difficult for some people to see the amount of humour they are expected to find in Steele Eudd's waitings. The incidents are there, but there is something so heavy in the touch with which they are handled that the fresh bloom of spontaneity is utterly destroyed — for some people. Nevertheless, his large circle of admirers will hail the arrival of his latest book, and find the humour of the parson's erratic congregation and the pathos of the paTson's bondage, whose , " rounds were never ended, who urged I his lean, folded horse along over roads that ran into ugly creeks '-and dark gullies and up the sides of mountain ranges," whose salary was_ not paid, and whose [ "manse" was a tumble-down shanty not j fit tor human habitation, not only admir able, but satisfying. Moreover, the book ends with the wedding of a young couple and the christening of a middle-agedi man — a combination of clerical dissipations celebrated by a dance, a feast, and the spirited j execution of a sword dance by the leading churchwarden, to the accompaniment of an old Scotch wife's singing, and under the complaisant eyes of the gentle, genial ( " parson."