outline portraits. We imply no censure in saying that it is a woman's book, in noting the obvious fact that the men, with one exception, appear in but shadowy characterization. In the subtlety of her analysis, the writer reminds us not a little of Mrs. Clifford, while in her successful use of the epigram she suggests the brilliant Englishwoman who chooses to sign her very feminine books with the assertively masculine name of "John Oliver Hobbes," Miss Bell is, we understand, a new-comer in the field of letters. It may safely be said that she has already won her spurs, and that her present performance justifies a lively expectation of excellent things to come. We hope that a rather forbidding title will not deter possible readers from making speedy ac- quaintance with a book possessing so distinct a charm.
In "Old Kaskaskia " Mrs. Catherwood has given us another of her delicate outline pictures of life in the Old Northwest. The story is placed in the early days of the present century, and in the town that was soon to become the first capital of a great commonwealth. It has for its culminating episode a great rising of the Mississippi in which half Kaskaskia was submerged, and which extricates the tangled threads of romance woven by the author's art, breaking some of them off, and uniting those that remain into more symmetrical patterns. The contrasted French and English types of character are delineated with a subtle feeling for their essential differences, while Mrs. Catherwood's restrained and exquisite style gives literary charm to every page of her work. One cannot help wishing that the author would, for once, work upon a larger canvas than any she has yet sought to cover. The field she has chosen is almost her own, and its romantic possibilities are considerable.
"Toppleton's Client" is an extravaganza that ranges all the way from dry Stocktonian humor to roaring farce. The central idea is that of the exchange of souls between bodies, and we may easily imagine the opportunities it offers a writer intent only upon the possible humorous complications. The "client" is an exiled spirit whose body is occupied by a usurping fiend, and who engages Toppleton (a lawyer whose chief work of reference is the "Comic Blackstone") to possess him once more of the bodily estate that he has lost. But the fiend is too sharp for the lawyer, and, preferring Toppleton's corporeal tenement to that in which he has been fraudulently dwelling, effects a substitution, and leaves Toppleton helpless, either to protect the rights of his client or to re-establish his own. The extravaganza is overdone, here and there, and its theory will not bear close scrutiny, but it is, as a whole, entertaining.
Of Mr. Kipling's "Many Inventions," many turn out to be variations upon the old familiar ones, and one gets a little tired even of Mulvaney and Ortheris and all the rest of the tribe of Atkins. But the volume contains one piece (which no one can forget who read it in the English review where it first appeared) which we are inclined to rank as the cleverest thing and perhaps the most finely imaginative that the author has ever done in prose. It is that romance of metempsychosis that he has chosen to style "The Finest Story in the World." The quotation-marks of this title are Mr. Kipling's, not ours, but we should be almost content to drop them, letting the name stand as a description of the author's own work, not of the work of his imaginary hero. It was a true stroke of genius to reincarnate, in a cockney banker's clerk, one of the men who sailed with Thorfin Karlsefne, and to bestow upon him reminiscent flashes of his past lives. The other stories in the book are of unequal value; one can hardly escape being fascinated by Mulvaney's adventure with "My Lord the Elephant," or finding in "A Conference of the Powers" a lesson at least worth the pondering. Mr. Kipling both introduces and closes his new collection of tales by some spirited verses.
Mr. Brander Matthews has long before this shown himself an adept in the art of the short story, and his new volume is, as a matter of course, vivacious and entertaining. The characters that he knows best are those supplied by his own New York environment of club and society life, although he reaches out, not without success, on one occasion to the wilds of British Guiana, and, on another, back to Augustan Rome. There are five stories altogether, two of which are distinctly romantic, one mildly satirical, one essentially humorous, and one a combination of all three of these qualities. We leave his readers to classify the five in accordance with our suggested scheme.
Mrs. Deland is a new-comer among the tellers of short stories, but it is clear that she has mastered more than the rudiments of the art. Her work comes close to that of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, not only in its choice of village scene and people, but also in its observation of the minuter humors of life, and in the delicacy of its treatment. Humor in any broader sense is lacking the writer, and the pathos of her humble tragedies seems to need some such relief as would be afforded by an occasional breeze blown from the brighter parts of life. She might profitably study "Octave Thanet," for example, with a view of making up for this defect. "Mr. Tommy Dove" and "A Fourth-class Appointment" are decidedly the best of the five stories, the latter being as effective a sermon on behalf of civil service reform as one often hears from a pulpit of any sort. If such stories could be multiplied, they might prove the very best way of striking the national conscience with shame for the "system" that has so cankered the vital organs of our political life.
In passing from the volume just mentioned to the new series of Mr. Sullivan's "Day and Night Stories," we go all the way from realism to romance, and find that, after all, romance is more sat-
