BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVIII, Issue XXV, 21 June 1902, Page 1292

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

"THE LAND OF THE LOST.” I have just received this book from the publishers, Messrs. Methuen and Co., Ixmdon, and find it a work of rather special interest. Its author is Mr William Satehell, of Auckland, who has already made himself favourably known to the reading public by a little volume of verse displaying a large amount of poetical ability. When it is understood that “The Land of the Lost" deals with life on a New Zealand gumficld, the appropriateness of its title will be readily appreciated in this colony, where the most striking characteristics of a gumfield and its Nomad population are widely known. Mr Satehell is more than successful in his minutely vivid description of his special gumfield, fat away in the “neglected North.” He brings it before our eyes in all its rea-lity-—we see its dreary vastness, its sad, grey colouring, its scarred surface, bearing unlovely witness to the work of the digger’s spade—we feel the depression of the loneliness brooding over the grave of a mighty forest, dead and vanished a thousand years ago. The God-forsaken aspect of the great gumfield forms a fitting environment for the lost souls that sparsely dot its vastness, and congregate thickly in the lonely inn of evil repute, where they are ever sealing their damnation afresh. The squalid degradation, the hopelessness, the forlorn recklessness of the lives of this lost legion, are detailed with convincing realism and power. It is the dreary gumfield and the wrecks of human lives stranded on it that give the dominant tone to Mr Satchcil's book, but the story the book tells is itself briskly written, and full of interest throughout. It contains plenty of episode, and has a plot that does not reveal itself too readily', while the author conceals the identity of his chief villain, nearly up to the end, with a cleverness worthy of the long-prac-tised Miss Brnddon. The hero and heroine are attractive personages, clean, wholesome vitalities, strongly contrasting with most of the denizens of the gumfield, and their love story, from its distinctly’ original beginning, to its rightly commonplace ending, makes pleasant reading. Among the minor characters in the novel, the author has given us, apart from the “Legion of the Lost.” portraits of various types of people on the gumfield, and in the fertile settlement adjoining it. And from Roller, the aggressively prosperous storekeeper, to Maria, the Hamiito'Bs’ half-caste servant, and the Maori bushfellers. they are all well individualised, and something more than mere puppets. In Jessamine Clive, the gently crazed gumdigger, whose fancy, picturesquely' astray, re-creates the vanished forest about him on the sun-scorched gumfield, Mr Satehell has drawn a character that represents no type, but is interestingly original, and appeals strongly to our sympathies. To conclude, “The Land of the Lost” is a book which is sure to be found interesting everywhere, and is

likely to be widely read and appreciated here, where its scenes and characters must have, to many of us, the added attraction of being pictures of realities we know.