Books of the Month.
The Truth-Tellers. By John Strange Winter.
It is related that a lady was introduced to Sir Morell Mackenzie at a London so1rée as “John Strange Winter,” and when he increduously repeated the name, she replied, “Oh, yes, I’m Bootles’ Baby." Whereupon the great physician drew a friend aside and confided to him that he had just met a poor demented lady who was introduced as a man and thought herself a baby. And this same jocund lady is the author, beside Bootles’ Baby, of a half-dozen stories which every reader of fiction knows and likes and re-reads whenever the mood for judiciously mingled fun and sentiment overtakes him.
The last book by Mrs. Arthur Stannard, called The Truth-Tellers, is just published in the Lippincott Series of Select Novels, and it is one of the most amusing and charming of her many tales. Miss Mortimer of London, sister of Sir Thomas Mortimer of Fynlan, “five hours from six hundred miles” to the north, has just learned that that eccentric baronet has died and left her guardian of his five children, whom she has never seen. She is not any longer young, and lives a fashionable life of sedate ease. The idea of going to the north shocks her immeasurably, and she decides to send for her nephews and nieces, forlornly expecting to find them youthful barbarians. They prove to be handsome and lusty, and far less objectionable than she supposed, but they have been brought up on a rigid system of truth-telling, which leads to the most amazing results in the select circle of Miss Mortimer’s conventional friends. The tale runs on to a climax in the love-making of Ernestine, the eldest girl, and Lord Dalston, and ends as the amused reader would have it.
Know your Own Ship. By Thomas Walton.
“Experience is a wonderful teacher, though often a very slow one,” and, we may add, a costly and dangerous one. It is with the above sentence that Mr. Thomas Walton, author of Know your Own Ship, the latest of the Lippincott publications in practical science, opens his well-condensed manual, and it is to supply the harvestings of experience to those who need them that the hand-book has been prepared. Mr. Walton is an eminent naval architect, and lecturer to ships’ oflicers in the Government Navigation School at Leith, and he is therefore an authority on the subject in hand, which, more amply expressed, is the simple explanation of the stability, construction, tonnage, and freeboard of ships. The substantial little volume is designed for the use of ships’ oflicers, superintendents, draughtsmen, and others who have to do with shipping in any form, and its text and abundant illustrations render it probably the best treatise devoted to this specialty.
In SIght of the Goddess. By Harriet Riddle Davis.
It is said to be not all fiction,—the story that the ofiice of unliveried steward of etiquette has been created in certain Washington families, whose social code, calls, dinners, correspondence, are all managed by a polite gentleman-servant in the guise of a guest or friend. Upon this novel and piquant theme has been
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