Miss Violet Parkinson, Hotel Kronprinz, Franzensbad, Austria.—­Safe. 
   JACK.

But La-ki-wa, we regret to say, says to herself, ’He belongs to Tall Pine, to the Dildoos, and to me,’ and never sends the telegram.  Subsequently, La-ki-wa proposes to Jack who promptly rejects her and, with the usual callousness of men, offers her a brother’s love.  La-ki-wa, naturally, regrets the premature disclosure of her passion and weeps.  ’My brother,’ she remarks, ’will think that I have the timid heart of a deer with the crying voice of a papoose.  I, the daughter of Tall Pine—­I a Micmac, to show the grief that is in my heart.  O, my brother, I am ashamed.’  Jack comforts her with the hollow sophistries of a civilised being and gives her his photograph.  As he is on his way to the steamer he receives from Big Deer a soiled piece of a biscuit bag.  On it is written La-ki-wa’s confession of her disgraceful behaviour about the telegram.  ‘His thoughts,’ Mr. Cumberland tells us, ’were bitter towards La-ki-wa, but they gradually softened when he remembered what he owed her.’

Everything ends happily.  Jack arrives in England just in time to prevent Dr. Josiah Brown from mesmerising Violet whom the cunning doctor is anxious to marry, and he hurls his rival out of the window.  The victim is discovered ‘bruised and bleeding among the broken flower-pots’ by a comic policeman.  Mrs. Parkinson still believes in spiritualism, but refuses to have anything to do with Brown as she discovers that the deceased Alderman’s ‘materialised beard’ was made only of ’horrid, coarse horsehair.’  Jack and Violet are married at last and Jack is horrid enough to send to ‘La-ki-wa’ another photograph.  The end of Dr. Brown is chronicled above.  Had we not known what was in store for him we should hardly have got through the book.  There is a great deal too much padding in it about Dr. Slade and Dr. Bartram and other mediums, and the disquisitions on the commercial future of Newfoundland seem endless and are intolerable.  However, there are many publics, and Mr. Stuart Cumberland is always sure of an audience.  His chief fault is a tendency to low comedy; but some people like low comedy in fiction.

The Vasty Deep:  A Strange Story of To-day.  By Stuart Cumberland.  (Sampson Low and Co.)

THE POETS’ CORNER—­X

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 24, 1889.)

Is Mr. Alfred Austin among the Socialists?  Has somebody converted the respectable editor of the respectable National Review?  Has even dulness become revolutionary?  From a poem in Mr. Austin’s last volume this would seem to be the case.  It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too seriously.  Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference.  But since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully representative of Mr. Austin’s mature views.  He gives us, at any rate, in its somewhat lumbering and pedestrian verses, his conception of the perfect state: