Messrs. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. have now in press a novel by a new Southern writer, Frances Nimmo Greene. It is entitled, "Into the Night," and is a tale of mystery laid in old New Orleans. Advance readers commend it highly. Miss Cable writes: "The author knows her New Orleans, and her characters are very live."

Henry Holt and Company, the publishers of "The Honorable Peter Stirling," now in its 52d edition, announce another New York political novel, William R. Hereford's "The Demagog." This novel has for its chief figure the owner of a string of powerful daily newspapers, who aspires to the presidency. The political problems involved are timely but the chief appeal comes from the peculiar personal relations of the characters, all of whom are clearly defined types.

Altho it is notorious that volumes of poetry by living authors are very poor "sellers," Messrs. Henry Holt and Company seem to be finding collections of poetry uncommonly profitable, as they are just sending Edward Verrall Lucas's "Open Road" to press for the eleventh time, and his "Friendly Town" and "Verses for Children" each for the fifth time. At the same time they are printing a new edition of "The Poetic Old World," compiled by Miss Lucy H. Humphrey.

There has been declamation enough, in Congress and in the newspapers, about Chinese immigration and Chinese labor, but Mary Roberts Coolidge's "Chinese Immigration," published by Henry Holt & Co. in their series devoted to American public problems, is the first attempt to deal with the question comprehensively and fairly. That there are Chinese and Chinese;

that it is no more fair to judge the Chinese than it is to judge any other people by the worst specimens of the race; and that the policy of exclusion and unjust treatment cannot be indefinitely continued if the United States is to hold its own in commercial and other intercourse with China are facts which have been as yet imperfectly apprehended by large numbers of Americans. Study of the present volume will aid a clearer understanding of all these questions. The treatment is both historical and logical. There is first a survey of the period of free immigration, continuing to the enactment of the restriction law of 1882; and then a review of the various measures of restriction and exclusion, the harsh and hostile treatment of Chinese in the United States, the demands of Kearneyism and the response of Congress. The effects of competition and the possibilities of assimilation are discussed in the last section. The author understands not only the art of assembling facts but the art of presenting them cogently and intelligently.

Miss Netta Syrett, after some years' practice of the art of fiction is still undecided as to the species of story which it best suits her to write, and one opens each of her new books with as little certainty as one might buy a lottery ticket. The latest, "A Castle of Dreams," is a pretty tale of an Irish heiress living in her father's half ruined castle, and neglected by him until he happens to think of her as a piece of property which a rich young boor of his acquaintance may like to buy for a wife. The story tells of what happens when the boor comes to woo, and of the gallant defence made by the girl with the aid of the fairy lore learned from her father's

people. Her would-be purchaser and her father agree that the courtship shall be witnessed by a company of their friends assembled at the father's castle, and there these persons, six rather coarse and stupid, men and women; a gentlewoman who has known the father all his life, an idle, kindly member of parliament and his secretary meet to gossip about their host and his daughter, and to be frightened by her tricks. Nearly all of them are a little too stupid to be credible, but they are amusing, and the heroine is a new variety of the Irish species. Here and there, and especially in the closing scenes, the author seems to write rather for the stage than for the reader, repeating and casually explaining far more than is necessary in matter intended to be read, but this is an easily amended fault, and otherwise the book is one of its author's best. A. C. McClurg & Co.

American humor has swept through a wide arc in the years since the stovepipe, the wheel-barrow, and the rocking-chair were its chief elements, and between the Danbury News and Mr. Robert Alexander Wason's "Happy Hawkins," lie Max Adeler and Hawkeye Burdette and Chimmie Fadden and Mr. George Ade and uncounted German and Irish, Italian and Japanese importations, but the book, although a Western story, is of the old Danbury brand, as laughter-provoking at the fourteenth reading as at the first. "Happy" on the ranch; on the trail; snowed up for the winter with an actor, an author, and an adventurer, is Connecticut in grain, without making much display of any weapon depending chiefly upon the mother-wit which serves him equally well in managing a gang of cowboys, in holding his own against a tyrannical employer, and in educating his employer's motherless little daughter. Always he is al

together a country-bred American, without a metropolitan thought in his mind. Being consistent, he has the uneducated man's incapacity to make a complicated story clear, and Edipus assisted by a chorus of Philadelphia lawyers would have a hard struggle to disentangle the matrimonial misadventures of his friends, and the wise reader will waste no time upon them. His adventures are wildly improbable, but they amuse and it is for that and naught else that they are written. The pathetic touch at the close merely serves to bring to mind the unselfish devotion with which the big, rough hero has acted from the beginning, and to show why, although his heart's desire is denied to his solitary life he is still "Happy" Hawkins. Small, Maynard & Co.

To achieve one stroke of originality is a favor granted to few authors, and he upon whom it has been conferred has no reason to expect its repetition. Mr. Ramsay Benson's "A Lord of Lands" was so skilfully written as to be equally acceptable as a story, and as a lesson in the comparative wisdom of abiding in a deadly struggle for bare sustenance instead of accepting the open proffer of the entire enjoyment of the work of one's hands. Now comes his "Melchisedec," and its possibilities are enmeshed in improbabilities; and further, its hero, instead of being one of a large class of human creatures with the same problems to solve, is a quarter-breed Indian, intent on precisely obeying what he understands to be the will of his Lord and Master, and therefore a creature, if not unique, most certainly very rare. He learns his Christianity from many sources; from a missionary priest; from a Protestant Evangelist; from a French physician of many shades of unbelief; from the pages of the Bible read without supervision; from

Jesuits; from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and Matthew Arnold's essay on St. Francis, and he tries to preach to a rural Unitarian congregation of uncommon perversity, and exaggerated delight in novelty, and dies during a public scrutiny of his faith and conduct, the result of his congregation's inevitable dissatisfaction. Surely no one could be less like the average man. And yet, may it not be that this wandering shepherd of the sheep solely because of his unselfish sincerity in seeking after righteousness has much to say to every normally comfortable Christian? The author's intention is far nobler than that of his first book, and its accomplishment is worth a score of those stories in which an author sets up his conception of a modern incarnation of Our Lord, and modestly asks readers to regard its superior artistic merit to the picture given by the evangelists. Henry Holt & Co.

It is all but twenty years since Captain A. T. Mahan published the first of the books by which he and others have impressed upon the civilized and half-civilized nations of the world the paramount importance of sea power, and now, in the fulness of his fame and influence, he confers an even greater benefit upon his fellow-men by giving them "The Harvest Within, being Thoughts upon the Life of a Christian." Those familiar with naval and military biography are aware that the proportion of humbly devout men is large among soldiers and sailors, but not many have deliberately, written books of the same class as Captain Mahan's, and few men immersed in the work of an arduous and absorbing profession would have found time for the prefatory reading, comparison and study, implied by the existence of this volume. In its fearless acceptance of the actual, in its avoidance of the oft reiterated plaint that this text is a

hard saying, or that command a counsel of perfection, one is tempted to call it characteristic of the fighter by profession. Really, it is as a man of his time that Captain Mahan writes here, as it was as a man of his time that he wrote of sea power, as the thought was stirring below the surface of the minds of sovereigns and law givers. In religious thought as in matters international, he bears the stamp of the successive influences moulding the last sixty years of thought. Born in a time when strict acceptance of a creed was honored, he lived to see scepticism rated as wisdom, and indifference as high propriety, and proving the novelties proffered as superior to the teachings of his Master, he held fast to that which is good, and now presents this book, the summary of the means by which he has overcome. Its chief thought as he gives it in the preface is that man is to-day susceptible of an enthusiasm for Jesus Christ resembling but surpassing that shown in the past in many nations for this or that historical character and that this enthusiasm is love, inspired less by His mighty deeds than by the sense of the excellence of His Person and by realization of personal relation to Him. The single motive, for the honor of Christ, or as He put it for Himself, for the glory of God, is alone full of light unifying all action, solving all perplexities. Nothing new, but always new. Here he is at one with the brave men of all professions, whom Mr. Kipling's daring scene, depicts as "gentleman unafraid" standing up when their Master comes among them in joyous reverence not in fear. This is the sort of Christian whom his book will make of the boy puzzled by preachers afraid to follow out the teachings of their creed and by universities too politic to insist that students shall render outward respect to religious truth. Little, Brown & Co.