in "The Man Against the Sky" (The Macmillan Co.) a dozen or more have been published in the Atlantic Monthly Scribner's Magazine, the Outlook, and other magazines and journals. They are all essentially modern; direct, straightforward and uncompromising in their characterization of present-day foibles; and breathing sometimes the spirit of a twentieth century prophet. From the title-poem these lines are taken:

Shall we, because Eternity records

Too vast an answer for the time-born words

We spell, whereof so many are dead that once

In our capacious lexicons

Were so alive and final, hear no more The Word itself, the living word no man Has ever spelt,

And few have ever felt

Without the fears and old surrenderings And terrors that began

When Death let fall a feather from his wings

And humbled the first man?
Because the weight of our humility,
Wherefrom we gain

A little wisdom and much pain,
Falls here too sore and there too tedious,
Are we in anger or complacency,
Not looking far enough ahead

To see by what mad couriers we are led

Along the roads of the ridiculous,

To pity ourselves and laugh at faith
And while we curse life bear it?
And if we see the soul's dead end in
death,

Are we to fear it?

What folly is here that has not yet a

name

Unless we say outright that we are liars What have we seen beyond our sunset fires

That lights again the way by which we came?

The Countess Barcynska's novel, "The Honey-Pot," is a story of the London stage, and its two heroines are chorus girls-one, the daughter of an

army officer, the other, an actress's child. The most rigid Puritan would scarcely paint their temptations in darker colors, though he would undoubtedly show less sympathy for the one who yields. Cleverly written, realistic in its details, but with a restraint which avoids offense, the book is decidedly readable, though the "happy ending" spoils not only the moral, but the artistic effect. E. P. Dutton & Co.

Miss Elsie Singmaster has so often written of the Pennsylvania Dutch that "Gettysburg," in which Americans of English speech are the chief actors, is a pleasant novelty; but years ago she showed herself mistress of the art of weaving a tale of battle. The point which she here impresses upon her readers is the nightmare horror of the long fight at Gettysburg to the noncombatants of the place. She makes her heroine a very young girl, and her hero a wounded Confederate soldier, and the two effect prodigies among the wounded who come or are brought from the field to her grandmother's house in which chance has stranded her. They are a self-forgetful pair and do not pause while anything remains to be done but gradually the roar of the cannon and the sight of blood and torture take possession of them, and the reader feels their suffering. The story comes to a pretty ending with fine little touches of relieving comedy at the very close, but many a serious historian has failed to leave his readers as strongly moved as those will be who scan this brief volume. The book is illustrated by B. J. Rosenmeyer and the author dedicates it to Miss Annie Wallace Horner, a native of Gettysburg. Houghton Mifflin Co.

A story for girls by the author of the "Glad" books is sure of an enthusiastic welcome, and the six heroines of Eleanor H. Porter's "Six Star Ranch"

are a merry, wholesome group. The sixteen-year-old daughter of a Texas ranch, after a year in a New England school, takes her special group of friends home with her for the summer, her father's generous purse paying all the bills. The "Happy Hexagons" are new to travel and the trip itself is full of adventures for them, which they record by turns in their club journal. The hospitality of the ample ranch, with ponies for all to ride, the hair-breadth 'scapes of the delighted cowboys, trips across the plains for visits with friends, the supper and dance for a final festivity, and the journey home by way of San Antonio and New Orleans are all described with piquant detail. The six girls are of clearly marked types, and the chapters which tell of their readjustment to school decorum are as interesting as any that precede. The illustrations, by R. Farrington Newell and Frank J. Murch, are uncommonly attractive, and will add greatly to its readers' pleasure in the book. The Page Company.

"Held to Answer" to a charge of stealing the diamonds of an actress who is infatuated with him, the quixotic young preacher who figures as the hero of Peter Clark Macfarlane's latest novel has landed on his feet so many times that the most anxious reader will not be over-surprised at his doing it again. A stenographer in a Los Angeles railroad office when the story opens, a sudden affection of the eyes unfits him for that work, but he develops initiative which in a short time leads the manager of a rival road to offer him a twelve thousand dollar position; refusing that to go upon the stage, which he considers his true mission, he is disenchanted by the calculating ambition of the actress to whom he has promptly lost his heart, in spite of a quasi attachment to the young daughter of his old employer, and he takes up a book

agency by which, in his fifth week, he makes one hundred and forty-five dollars. The step into the pulpit of "All People's" follows as casually. Like others of his school of fiction, Mr. Macfarlane has talent enough to do work of a higher grade than this. Little, Brown & Co.

Frederick Scott Oliver, author of "Ordeal by Battle" (The Macmillan Co.) was one of the little group of thoughtful Englishmen who were associated with Lord Roberts in what proved to be a futile effort to arouse England in season to the necessity of preparing for a possible European war; and in the present work he has embodied some of the conclusions which were reached in those conferences. But the march of events was rapid, and the crisis predicted followed so swiftly upon the prophecy that the material then accumulated is now out of date. "Ordeal by Battle" is a thoughtful and vigorous presentation not only of the causes of the present war, and of the spirit which has prompted Germany's entrance into it and conduct in it, but also of the mistakes and defects of British policy and the errors of judgment and administration for which Great Britain is now paying so dearly. Written with candor and great plainness of speech, but without passion and equally without egotism, it comes as near expressing the verdict of history as can be expected of a contemporary record. To American readers, it should have an added value and interest as a warning against an easy-going security and an absorption in immediate, material interests. The book is dedicated to Major Hugh Dawnay of the Life Guards, and Brigadier General John Edmund Gough, who participated in Lord Roberts's conferences, and both of whom fell early in the present war, Dawnay at Zwarteleen in November, 1914, and Gough near

That one should be able to buy such a work as John Richard Green's "Short History of the Fnglish People," revised and brought down to date, in two volumes, for seventy cents, is one of the marvels which Everyman's Library has made possible. The volumes are closely but clearly printed, and there are seven maps, the latest and most interesting showing British possessions in 1814 and 1914. The text is that of the first edition of Green's work, which is followed without change; but notes are added which indicate changes required by later research. Green's history ended, practically, with the Battle of Waterloo; though, in a brief Epilogue, he gave a rapid survey of the years from 1815 to 1832. To the work as now printed there is added a political and social survey of the period from 1815 down to the outbreak of the present war. This is written by Mr. R. P. Farley, and it covers about fifty pages. It is in accord with the spirit of the original work, and makes a useful supplement to it. E. P. Dutton & Co.

Stella Benson's "I Pose" is an amusing tale of contemporary England, with incidental criticism of its landed proprietors, corporate bodies, dogs and their owners, political agitators, girls, clergymen, cockneys and policemen; its heroine is a very small, white-faced suffragette, its hero is called the gardener and it ends with a stupendous and unexpected catastrophe which is very lucky for the gardener. Next to the suffragette, it is the exquisite scenery of rural England upon which the author depends for impressing her readers, and she leaves many an agreeable picture upon the memory. She astonishes the unsophisticated American by her lavish use of the word "nigger," which she freely applies to mestizo,

not the wrath of the American press or of the American office-seeker. But she is hardly more courteous to the Trinity Islands, the Spanish main, and the memory of Drake, and in many other matters she is so elaborately unreasonable that one half suspects her of being a man in disguise; but she is never stupid. She is modern, in every word, modern in tone and in cynical scoffing at emotion, and modern indeed in her treatment of the Church of England which she chooses to represent by a Pharisaical creature whose constant refrain is "Yerce, yerce," and whose mind is full of the meanest suspicion. The gardener, reared under Church influences, "finds that the Christian pose does not appeal to him." "Yes," writes the author, in conclusion, "I pose of course, but how deep does the pose extend?" And the gardener remains in a pose. It is thus that those end to "whom Christianity has ceased to appeal." The Macmillan Company.

Cardinal Newman's lectures on "The Scope and Nature of University Education," delivered at Dublin in 1852, preparatory to the assumption of the rectorship of the new Irish Catholic University, and first published in that year, are now reprinted in Everyman's Library, with a Preface by Wilfrid Ward, Editor of the Dublin Review. (E. P. Dutton & Co.) They treat of the relations of Theology to other branches of knowledge; of liberal knowledge as its own end, and in relation to learning and to religion; and of the duties of the church toward liberal knowledge; and they are of value, not only as a clear and able presentation of Catholic opinion upon the important subjects discussed, but for the light which they throw upon the mental processes and changes of one of the foremost leaders in Catholic religious thought.

UPHOLSTERY

DEPARTMENT