Madam Constantia (LONGMANS) is a war story, but of an earlier and more picturesque war.  A simple tale, I am bound to call it, revolving entirely round a situation not altogether unknown to fiction, in which the hero and heroine, being of opposite sides, love and fight one another simultaneously.  Actually the scene is set during the American struggle for independence, thus providing a sufficiency of pomp and circumstance in the way of fine uniforms and pretty frocks; and the protagonists are Captain Carter, of the British service, and Constantia Wilmer, daughter of the American who had captured him.  Perhaps you may recall that the identical campaign has already provided a very similar position (reversed) in Miss Elizabeth’s Prisoner.  It is only a deserved tribute to the skill with which Mr. JEFFERSON CARTER has told this adventure of his namesake to admit that I am left with an uncertainty, not usual to the reviewing experience, whether it is in fact a true or an imagined affair.  In any event its development follows a well-trodden path.  We have the captive, jealous in honour, susceptible and exasperatingly Quixotic, doubly enchained by his word and the charms of his fair wardress; the lady’s conspicuous ill-treatment of him at the first, a slight mystery, some escapes and counterplots, and on the appointed page the matrimonial finish that hardly the most pessimistic reader can ever have felt as other than assured.  Fact or fiction, you may spend an agreeable hour in watching the course of Captain Carter’s courtship overcoming its rather obvious obstacles.

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Because I have so great an admiration for their beneficent activities, I have always wanted to meet a novel with a lot about dentists in it, and now Miss DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON, in The Tunnel (DUCKWORTH), has satisfied my desire.  Dentists—­a houseful of them—­spittoons, revolving basins; patients going upstairs with sinking feelings; wondering at the pattern on the wallpaper; going down triumphant.  Teeth.  Appointment books.  Dentists everywhere.  This is not a quotation, but very like one, for Miss RICHARDSON affects the modern manner.  Though one of the dentists is quite the most agreeable person in the book, he isn’t the hero, because the author is much too clever to have anything of the sort.  Her method, exploited some time ago in that remarkable book, Pointed Roofs, is to get right inside one Miriam Henderson and keep on writing out her thoughts with as little explanation of her circumstances as possible, so that The Tunnel, to anyone who has missed the earlier books, must be very nearly unintelligible.  Even the sincere admirer of Miss RICHARDSON’S talent will begin to wonder how many more books at the present rate of progress must be required to bring Miriam to, say, threescore years and ten.  My own belief is that if her creator is ever so ill-advised as to