They may be regarded as the " dime novels" of the lawyer. Poe's and Gaboriau's are unrivaled. Anna Katherine Green has written at least one which warmly commends itself to the legal sense — "The Leavenworth Case." The very recent ones of Conan Doyle, — "Memoirs and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" — are always ingenious even when absurd, and they are too frequently absurd. But the lawyer in vacation likes anything out of the ordinary beat, even if absurd, and will find himself reading the two volumes through with avidity, although he may poohpooh at every other page. Just now our purpose is to point out several bad slips in two of the most horrible and preposterous. In "The Yellow Face," for example, the writer plants himself on very shaky physiological ground in supposing that a mulatto and a white woman can breed "a coal-black negress" child. In this tale also the writer makes a mistake In having the wife, who had had such a child by a former marriage, and wished to conceal it, but at the same time loved the child and desired to provide for it, voluntarily make over all her property to the new husband, with the simple privilege of drawing on it from time to time. Again, how did she support the child for three years without drawing on those funds? Dr. Doyle quite unnecessarily raised a sus picion in the husband's mind by this device. In the powerful but extremely horrible and utterly impos sible story of "The Speckled Band," the villain is made to introduce into the bed-room of his step daughter, whom he wishes to put out of the way, a venomous Indian swamp-adder, by means of a dummy bell-rope communicating with a ventilator above her bed. The snake encircles the victim's forehead and stings her to death almost instantly, in the dead of the night. In dying she shrieks, "The speckled band! " Now how did she know it was speckled or a band? Besides, what normal woman would have failed to discover that the bell-rope com municated with no bell, and that the bed was clamped to the floor, and thus have her suspicions aroused? "Parables do not go on all four," but detective stories ought to do so. A greater artist than Dr. Doyle, however — Charles Reade — in "The Cloister and the Hearth " made even a more gratuitous blunder. In that tremendous scene where Gerard and Denys are trepanned by the murderers in the inn, and Denys with his cross-bow shoots the first one who ascends to kill the travelers, and Gerard sets his body up and with phosphorous converts his face into the image of a grinning skull, it was entirely superfluous for him to write "La Mort" on the fore head, for it is evident that none of the assassins could read — indeed it is expressly stated that they were " ignorant brutes." We are glad Mr. Reade is not here to abuse us for venturing this criticism.
The Sign of Matrimony. — Some Englishman writes to the " Pall Mall Gazette" that the cause of social morality will be served if every married person have " a circle tatooed round the third finger of the left hand in place of or as well as the wedding ring." He is convinced that this would save honest people from many sad entanglements, make bigamy im possible, and prevent many breach of promise suits. He says : — "To make this proposition practical and distinctive of course certain rules would have to be made. For instance, any unmarried man or woman tattooing their third linger to be heavily fined. Every widow and widower to add a distinguishing star to their ring. Every married man or woman disunited by law to have a bar of erasure across their wedding ring, and those who marry two or three times to add the extra circles accordingly. The operation of tattooing could, with all reverence, be performed by an expert in the vestry after the church service, or at the registrar's office for those who only go through the civil ceremony." ' If this had appeared in an " American "- news paper, it would of course have been a joke, but we cannot believe it anything of the kind in this instance. It sounds just like an ecclesiastical device. Hurrah for compulsory vaccination and compulsory tattooing! Those bishops who voted against the deceased wife's sister are just capable of setting up a tattoo an nex in the vestry. There should of course be a duly baptized and vaccinated tattooer in orders, and he shall be allowed a liberal fee for the adminis tration of the rite. Government brands its mules; why should it not tattoo its married subjects?
Compulsory Education. — One of the most decayed of dead-letter laws in the State of New York has been a law for compulsory education. Nobody ever heard of any attempt or wish to enforce it. But last winter the legislature of that State enacted a fresh law for the same purpose, and it has been hailed by the press as the harbinger of glorious things, without a hint about the old law. The fact is that very few newspaper writers now-a-days are old enough to recollect anything that occurred twenty years ago. The original law was very meritorious in purpose, and so of course is the present, and it is sincerely to be hoped that it will be enforced. Not perhaps that universal education is an unfailing panacea or preventive, for statistics seem to show that the tolerably well educated classes are not unrepresented in the State prisons; but it must be admitted that education does something towards the prevention of crime as well as toward the fostering of general thrift and virtue. The modicum of education which enables boys to read dime novels may
