the boys who read about them will not find their adventures less exciting because their hunting is done, not with guns, but with the camera. If, incidentally, from the story and from the illustrations which decorate it, they learn something of the uses of the camera and become qualified for like quests, so much the better.

Anna Chapin Ray's "Buddie" is the story of a boy upon whom shortsighted parents had bestowed the name "Ernest Angell" but who had so strong an aversion to the name that he was impelled to challenge to deadly combat any boy who called him by it, and whose mischievous conduct at school and among his playmates suggested that the appellation was at least premature. But he was a hearty, wholesome boy, none the less, and this record of his experiences, occupations and friendships is likely to appeal to boys of a similar type. Boys who read it will be glad that it is the first of a series by a writer who promises to do for boys what she already has done for girls in the "Sidney" and "Teddy" books. Little Brown & Co.

Less grim and tragic than Jack London's wont is "Adventure," and quite unrelated to any ethical or economic problems-a mere trifle, thrown off in some holiday mood, no doubt. But it is a picturesque and stirring story of life in the Solomon Islands, its hero a young Englishman at his wits' end to finance his plantation till his cocoanuts begin to yield, to whom appears, as he is holding in leash a gang of feverstricken, mutinous cannibals, an American girl at the helm of a whale-boat rowed by Tahitian sailors. Joan Lackland proves to be the heiress of a rich Hawaii cattleman with a passion for exploration, and she insists that she is only following family tradition by joining fortunes, in a "strictly business partnership," with her reluctant host.

The end of the story is easily imagined, but the intervening incidents are full of the unexpected, and the interest does not flag for a moment. The Macmillan Company.

By a coincidence, "George Thorne," the hero of Norval Richardson's new novel, overhears in the Colorado mining-office where he is employed as clerk a conversation which reveals a scheme of his employers for cheating the Eastern owner and at the same time informs him of a striking resemblance between the owner's wife and himself. By another coincidence, one of the partners drops from his pocket an old newspaper clipping referring to the kidnapping of the capitalist's child, some twenty years earlier. George is immediately struck with the possibility of passing himself off as the missing son, and buying the silence of his employers by threatening to expose his knowledge of their own plans. The plot is ingeniously developed, with lavish details of the luxurious life of the metropolis; an element of psychological interest is introduced in a way to increase its plausibility; and readers who enjoy a story of its type will count this an uncommonly good one. L. C. Page & Co.

Novel-writing and pamphleteering

are

getting considerably confused. The novel that attacks the conventionalities is an everyday affair, and the novel that attacks the existing economic order is not new, nor the novel that attacks the church. The novel that attacks the army is more of a surprise. But the novel that attacks all four at once can that be a novel at all? Isn't it just plain propaganda? Indeed it can be a novel, and of the most readable sort, if its name is "The Visioning" and its writer Susan Glaspell, and one is almost tempted to believe that she wrote it for art's sake as they did in the brave days of old, and

that the propaganda are only designed as stage-setting for dear Katie Jones, the "army girl," her protegée, Ann, the chorus-girl, her. brother, Captain Wayneworth Jones, at work on his new invention for the Ordnance Department, and her lover, "the man who mends the boats," as they play their separate parts on the beautiful Government island in the Mississippi. Quarrel as the conservative reader will with its teaching-if it really means to teach-the book is certainly one of the brightest of the season. Frederick A. Stokes Company.

The titles of the five novels completed by Will Lillibridge before his lamented death at but thirty-one years of age "Ben Blair," "Where the Trail Divides," "The Dissolving Circle," "The Quest Eternal," and "The Dominant Dollar" suggest the essential characteristics of his work, his familiarity with the vigorous, picturesque life of the West, his protest against convention and materialism, and his imaginative power with its tinge of melancholy. The short stories-many of them published before in magazine form-which are now gathered into a volume called "A Breath of Prairie," show the same qualities, and deepen the regret that his career should have been so short and the conviction that added years would have added to his reputation. Few writers write so spontaneously, with such exuberance of enthusiasm, out of such genuine sympathy with their subjects. The long est story in this volume-a study of unhappy marriage-is the least characteristic and the least successful. But the opening sketch, of an ambitious boy longing to leave the prairie but held by the needs of his father and mother, is wonderfully real and touching. Equally real, but in lighter vein, is "A Dark Horse," the description of a Marathon race in an Iowa college.

A brief introduction increases the personal interest of the volume, and one feels sure that it is supplemented by a bit of genuine autobiography in the sketch called "The Madness of Whistling Wings." A. C. McClurg & Co.

"The nomadic, bachelor West is over, the housed, married West is established," writes Owen Wister in the delightful preface to the volume of stories of Wyoming which he names "Members of the Family." Among the nomads are Scipio Le Moyne, the shrewd, genial and upon occasion garrulous cow-boy, hunter and guide, who figures in nearly all the stories; Uncle Pasco, the bad old gentleman with black coat and white beard who holds up the paymaster in his cabin; McDonough, the rustler; Lem Speed, the cattleman; Timberline, the stock-tender, with Waiting for nothing stamped plain upon him from head to foot, as it is stamped upon certain figures all the world over; Aaron Tace, the shell-game man, and old Kultus Jake and Frisco Baldy who have crossed the line together into childhood. Less picturesque, perhaps, but not less interesting, are the housed-and-married, such as Jimsy Culloden with his pretty. scolding wife; Mr. Edmund, the storekeeper at Beekman, with the heap of misplaced seriousness in his system to conquer, whose happiness fills and crowds the cabin when he brings the little school-teacher home to share it with him; and Sir Francis Drake. whose stately figure points a moral for the final tale. Thoroughly at home in the region which he loves to describe and thorough master of the art of description, Mr. Wister has few rivals in his field. It is a pity that he sometimes resorts to the exaggerated and artificial, and so fails of the effect of absolute reality achieved now and then by writers far less brilliant. The Macmillan Co.