thinking about, anything else.  Nor could I help reflecting how much fuller and more vigorous all Mrs. CLIFFORD’S cast would have found their existence to-day.  Perhaps this feeling explains a slight impatience which the society of so much struggling femininity eventually produced in me.  Young women still live in houses in the Marylebone Road; they still proclaim republics of hardworking celibacy, and fall briskly in love with the first eligible bachelor; but their vocations and their citizenship have both (Hoch der KAISER!) grown out of all knowledge.  So that charming writer, Mrs. CLIFFORD, must forgive me if I could find only an historical interest, and no very robust one at that, in her amiable retrospect.

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AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE have certainly been well advised about their sub-title to The Black Office and other Chapters of Romance (MURRAY).  For that is precisely what the tales are; and excellently romantic and thrilling chapters too, for the most part dated in the decade following the great Anglo-French peace of a century ago.  Probably you couldn’t say off-hand what the Black Office was.  Let me whisper.  It was, amongst other things, a postal censorship that opened and perused all letters intended to cross the Channel.  With what natural indignation would you, in July three years ago, have read of such monstrous activities!  Truly, as the authors say, there is some interest in the comparison of then and now.  Of the other stories, my own favourites would he “The Resurrectionist” and “The Smile on the Portrait.”  The first of these is a haunting affair of body-snatching, or rather of an early escapade of the notorious BURKE, who was asked to supply a red-haired corpse, and not finding one produced instead a gentleman who had yet to fulfil the condition precedent to body-snatching, i.e. who had to be killed first and snatched afterwards.  This is certainly as grim as anything I have met over the Castellated signature.  Beside it, “The Smile on the Portrait,” the tale of a jealous husband who becomes a maniac, is almost soothing.  They had clearly their little worries even a century ago.  The CASTLES, as everybody knows, have always had the trick of adventurous fiction; The Black Office, etc., proves that their hands have lost nothing of their cunning.

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One has heard so often of works of “absorbing interest” that appeared at “the psychological moment” that one feels a bit squeamish about applying these phrases even to such a book as Mr. HARRY DE WINDT’S Russia as I Know It (CHAPMAN AND HALL); but honestly their appropriateness cannot be denied in view of the author’s peculiar knowledge of the too mysterious country on which interest just now is so poignantly concentrated.  He has not only traversed Siberia as few, even Russians, have done—­that is an old though still thrilling story—­but he has ranged at large over the