AMONG THE BOOKS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 28, 9 July 1892, Page 4 (Supplement)

AMONG THE BOOKS.

(From the Otago Witness ) ‘ Frank Melton’s Luck : or Off to New Zealand,’ by Thos. Cottle. Auckland : H. Brett. We read the first few chapters of this book from a sense of duty and a conscientious desire to do justice to a colonial author, whose preface intimated that his aim was to realistically and faithfully depict station life in New Zealand ; we read the balance without rising, because we liked it. The writer has very sensibly woven his description of the phase of colonial life to which he refers into a narrative. Some good descriptive • bits ’ there are, some fair power of narrative, as for instance the description of an up-country race meeting in the North Island, where the Wanganui Cup is won by an outsider euphoniously chiistened Dot-and-go-one, which is really an excellent one, and the dramatic incident in the church which precedes the fall of the curtain on virtue triumphant, and vice dragged off to merited punishment, which is the goal where all good stories—and plays, according to Miss Kemble—ought to end.

The story may be briefly described without destroying the interest for the reader. The hero finds himself in England, unable to follow an academical career, being more addicted to outdoor sports than to study ; so it is decided to ship him off to the colonies. This was in the early days, when it was a popular superstition at Home that any person unfitted for the ordinary pursuits of life would do for the colonies provided he could ride a horse. The disagreeable voyage out is minutely described and the characters introduced. They duly land at Auckland —the year is 1866 -and separate ; our hero to go southward to Taranaki, his chum to hang about town, to fall to the position of horse-coper, to join the Forest Rangers, be wounded seriously, tended during his hospital sickness by his faithful ladylove, and be left a legacy and become happy and virtuous ever afterwards. The hero enters the service of his uncle, who has a cattle station in Taranaki, and has two charming half caste daughters, and the impressionable young fellow incontinently falls in love with one of them. The path of love is crossed by the villain, who is ultimately stripped of his borrowed plumes just in time. The work at the station is minutely described. Horse-breaking, cattle-mustering, pigsticking, camping-out, and all the other incidentals of colonial life are described in detail, as well as an episode in the Maori war, which Melton engages in that he may escape the torture of seeing his beloved cousin possessed by another. This is well done, because in it is observable some self-re-straint where the temptation to write sensationally must have been strong. The author could easily have made himself the hero of any quantity of stirring encounters with the Hauhaus, but he doesnot—he simply describes a short raid, and does it so as to give an idea of Maori warfare. He also depicts a sharebroking fever, caused by the rich discoveries at the Thames goldfields. The work, on the whole, is just such a one as we should expect to find written up by some person who had been entrusted with another’s well keep diary, and who had never strayed beyond the limits of his text.