Mabel, Mildred and the rest are real girls and the incidents used to enforce little points of conduct and etiquette real incidents. So also is Rob, Priscilla's brother, a real boy. The effect of the sixteen chapters, touching upon Tempers and Tongues, Managing Money, Vacation Manners, The Art of Liking People, Self-Consciousness, Friendship, The Generous Heart, Letter-Writing and other matters is almost that of so many chapters of a story; and the girl reader will have the unusual experience of being entertained at the same time that she is being profited. There is an engaging humor in the book, and the tone is sunny and sympathetic. It is a frequent error of parents, uncles and aunts, and other grown folk to bestow upon young people books which they think they ought to like, but which, after a perfunctory acknowledgment, go upon the shelf and stay there. But whoever gives this book to a bright girl may be reasonably certain that it will be read, and read with real pleasure. It is printed and bound in a manner to suggest Christmas uses, and a pretty decorative border sets off the pages.

Some of the most delicate touches in Robert Hichens' new novel, "The Way of Ambition," are given to the relation of the mother and daughter who exercise counter influences on the talent of the young composer, Claude Heath. Mrs. Mansfield, "having been brought up among lions, had never hunted a lion in her life. She had never felt within herself the power to create anything original, and was far too intelligent, far too aristocratic in mind, to struggle impotently to be what she was not meant to be, or to fight against her own clearly seen limitations. Unlike Mrs. Mansfield in this respect, Charmian struggled, and her mother knew it." Charmian's am

bitious fancy fastens on Heath-whom a modest fortune has permitted to develop his musical gift in retirement, and to whom the rivalries of artistic London are odious-and for one fatuous moment he imagines himself in love with her. Disillusionment follows at once, but the wife's ambition, none the less, succeeds in dominating the husband's ideals. It is for opera that she destines his triumph, and her restless energy finds him a libretto in Paris, hurries him to Algiers in search of color and atmosphere, and persuades an American impresario to produce his work in New York. The book holds the attention not only by the strong character-drawing and the concentrated interest of the plot, but by the abundance of realistic detail. Frederick A. Stokes Company.

The son of the rector of a fashionable New York church of the 'seventies is the hero of Basil King's new novel, "The Way Home," and among the women whose lives touch his to the very last are the daughter of its leading member and the daughter of a boarding-house keeper on its outskirts. Shrewd, sensitive and highspirited, he is restive even in his childhood under the arrogance of the rich men who rule St. David's; his experiences at Harvard, where his boyhood friends, "owing to the necessity of making the best clubs and not being seen with the wrong people, are obliged to drop him," deepen his sense of the importance of money; and when his father is bluntly asked to exchange his salary for an "emeritus," his decision is made to abandon the ministry for which his mother had destined him, and to take as the only workable rule of life, "Every man for himself." Up to this point the cynical reader has been expecting to delight himself with one exposé more of the hollowness of the modern church. But

from the time when Charlie Grace leaves college to accept from his brother-in-law in Winnipeg the position on the new Trans-Canadian railroad which has been promised to another man, the hollowness exposed is that of his own individual character. A brilliant business career, two dubious love-affairs and an unsatisfactory marriage are the main features of a plot which is subordinate to a powerful and subtle analysis of motives and influences. The closing chapters are of a poignancy not easily forgotten. Harper & Brothers.

For the setting of her latest book "The Story of Waitstill Baxter" Kate Douglas Wiggin has gone back to Riverboro, the town made famous by her Rebecca. This time the story is of a young woman and it has many elements of tragedy, but it kindles the reader with the same warmth of feeling for its characters which Mrs. Wiggin can always evoke. It tells of a strange religious fanatic, Joseph Cochrane, who flamed through New England and cast his spell upon many impressionable people. An example of the havoc he wrought in many homes is furnished by the broken Boynton family where Ivory, Waitstill Baxter's lover, grew up. Waitstill's own family life gives a picture of that harsh, cruel aspect of New England character which unfortunately truth in it. But it is a contrasting background for one of the sweetest, noblest women characters that have appeared for a long time. The story of Waitstill's struggle at home and her love which was greater for its delayed fulfilment, reveals Mrs. Wiggin at her greatest power. Houghton Mifflin Company.

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"The Mixing" by Bouck White is a study of a rural town that found itself, that developed a community consciousness. Hillport, a village among

the hills not very far distant from New York, was composed of three classes of people: the "natives" who allowed their places to run down and who had no ambition whatever; the summer visitors, part of whom kept their residences open through the winter; and the commuters, whose only interest in the place was a temporary one. George Dagner, a far-sighted young clergyman, had a vision of what Hillport might become, not through more religion but through a spirit of brotherhood and cooperation. He fired others with his enthusiasm and after five or six years' work, often against great opposition, the community awakened. At last it became self-supporting in every sense, raising all its food products, and cooperating in the sale of everything marketable. It had public buildings, its own water supply, a printing press, a developed taste for the beautiful and a wonderful democracy. The book is so full of enthusiasm and optimism that it makes every idea the author advances seem possible. Doubleday Page and Company.

Yesterday's nonsense is to-day's science, as yesterday's idol is to-day's laughing-stock, and to read Mr. Lewis Spence's "Myths of Mexico and Peru" is to be made to see these truths, and to have one's conviction confirmed, derived from the new archæology and the new philology of European and Asiatic, and African civilizations, that all myths have a common origin. Indeed as one continues to watch Mr. Spence fit the symmetrical figures of his scientific puzzle together, one wonders if that were not a wise monarch who insisted that his sages should condense all knowledge, and condense it again and again, until one brief maxim was all that remained for him to learn. Mr. Spence, luckily for English reading men, proceeds differ

ently, expounding his subject elaborately, but skilfully, leading his reader himself to contrast and compare myth with myth, legend with legend, record with record, and gods with gods, and to draw his own inferences. It is easy to fancy that one is very wise and very skilful as one pursues the pleasant labor, and to underrate the concealed art by which one has been led to enjoy it, but if he who shall read "The Myths of Mexico and Peru" be not grateful to Mr. Spence he deserves never again to read a book with which conversing he can forget all time. The large, heavy volume has some four score pictures, some carefully drawn to show pagan rites in actual process, others photographs of objects pre-dating the Spanish occupation by uncounted centuries; and it has a modest and graceful preface by a few pages dated Edinburgh. Thomas Y. Crowell Company.

"The Dust of the Road" by Marjorie Patterson, relates the fortunes of a young American girl while she was receiving her dramatic training in an English Shakespearean Stock Company. It is an unusual story because of its fine sense of proportion. Tony, the heroine is a clever little person who takes her hard knocks as part of the day's work, and finds her moments of triumph as fleeting as her times of despair. David Hearn, the sculptoractor whom Tony accepts after great waverings of spirit between love and her career is an interesting character. A thorough Bohemian, he is the kind whom the conventional novelist would have described either as a selfish monster or an impractical dreamer. But Miss Patterson has created a man who is neither, one whose personality is a mingling of many strange qualities with manliness and nobility not among the least. The story gives

what is undoubtedly a true picture of life in an English Stock Company. It is peculiarly acceptable because it has romantic interest without false glamor, and realism without sordidness. Henry Holt and Company.

Dr. Richard Burton's "The New American Drama" is written in a spirit of cheerful hope including the author, the actor, ignorant and competent spectators and critics; the little children whose spontaneous applause comes at precisely the right point, and the man of riper years who finds "the young fellows" quite as good as the giants who lived in the days of his youth. It takes cognizance of the growing tendency, both municipal and philanthropic, to respond to the call of Matthew Arnold to organize the theatre, to utilize the immense power allowed in evil times to lie inert or to be viciously active, and for encouragement mentions some of the various places at home and in distant parts of the earth in which the theatre is regarded as a civic trust. The author might have cited the late Dr. Hale and Miss Mary Agnes Tincker as having created Utopian lands wherein the theatre was both a public charge and a private trust and he does make some telling quotations from Lowell and Aldrich to illustrate certain points. He is not blind to the mercenary greed still visible here and there in matters pertaining to the drama; he sees the worse but he follows the better and his book will be a powerful, although gentle agent for Thomas Y. Crowell Company.

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The adventures of a meanly ambitious woman while traversing the road between obscure poverty as attendant in a department shop to lucrative notoriety on the stage compose the book to which Mr. Louis Joseph Vance