What chiefly impressed me about Marshdikes (UNWIN) was what I can only call the blazing indiscretion of the chief characters.  To begin with, you have a happily married young couple asking a nice man down for the week-end to meet a girl, and as good as telling him that the party has been arranged, as the advertisements put it, with a view to matrimony.  Passing from this, we find a doctor (surely unique) blurting out to a fellow-guest at dinner that a mutual friend had consulted him for heart trouble.  To crown all, when the match arranged by the young couple has got as far as an engagement, the wife must needs go and tell the girl that the whole affair was manoeuvred by herself.  Which naturally upset that apple-cart.  It had also the effect of making me a somewhat impatient spectator of the subsequent developments, mainly political, of the plot.  I smiled, though, when the hero was worsted in his by-election.  After all, with a set of supporters so destitute of elementary tact....  But, of course, I know quite well what is my real grievance.  Miss HELEN ASHTON began her story with a chapter so full of sparkle that I am peevish at being disappointed of the comedy that this promised.  Perhaps next time she will take the hint, and give us an entire novel in the key which, I am sure, suits her best.

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A Little World Apart (LANE) is one of those gentle stories that please as much by reminding you of others like them as by any qualities of their own.  Indeed you might call it, with no disparagement intended, a fragrant pot-pourri of many rustic romances—­Our Village, for example, and more than a touch of Cranford.  Your literary memory may also suggest to you another scene in fiction almost startlingly like the one here, in which the gently-born lover (named Arthur) of the village beauty is forced to combat by her rustic suitor.  Fortunately, however, Mr. GEORGE STEVENSON has no tragedy like that of Hetty in store for his Rose.  His picture of rural life is more mellow than melodramatic; and his tale reaches a happy end, unchequered by anything more sensational than a mild outbreak of scandal from the local wag-tongues.  There are many pleasant, if rather familiar, characters; though I own to a certain sense of repletion arising from the elderly and domineering dowagers of fiction, of whom Lady Crane may be regarded as embodying the common form. A Little World Apart, in short, is no very sensational discovery, but good enough as a quiet corner for repose.

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[Illustration:  A MODEL FOR THE HUNS IN BELGIUM.

NERO MAKES HIMSELF POPULAR ON A FLAG-DAY IN AID OF HOMELESS ROMANS REDUCED
TO DESTITUTION BY THE GREAT FIRE.]

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A VISION OF BLIGHTY.