Page:Gaston Leroux--The man with the black feather.djvu/341

This page needs to be proofread.

A new novel by the author of "Happy Hawkins"



The Knight-Errant

By Robert Alexander Wason
Author of "Happy Hawkins," etc., etc.

Illustrated by HANSON BOOTH

$1.25 net; by mail, $1.37


A modern, city-bred "Happy Hawkins," one Philip Lytton by name, a young man with ample fortune and excellent ideas about enjoying the good things in life, takes to heart the taunts of his lady love and engages entertainingly in business. Making a failure of it in his simple, blundering way he leaves New York to seek his fortunes in the Far West. Here Mr. Wason takes us over familiar ground in that country that he knows so well and has already written about so engagingly in Happy Hawkins, the country which Dr. Crothers so well names "the land of the large and charitable air."

Mr. Wason knows men and women, their strength and weakness, their vices and virtues, and packed to the covers though it is with incident, with suspense, with the essence of story interest, his new book yet carries a strong moral. His fresh, spontaneous humor, which the Nation has called "American humor in its best estate," flashes everywhere.

Someone has compared a Wason book to the wildwood, with its lights and shadows, its lilting melodies, its sudden storms, its joyous freedom. Editors, publishers, his friends, his critics, have all objected to an apparent lack of technique in Mr. Wason's writing; but he continues to mingle humor and pathos, the dramatic and the argumentative, the tender and the cynical, with all the prodigality and originality of old Nature herself. Of stories there is no end; but in addition to a real story, a Wason book gives the reader the rare privilege of intimate association with a broad, sympathetic and discriminating personality. It is not necessary to agree with him—he fattens on controversy—and the reader who enters into the spirit of it can find much of what Stevenson calls the joy of mental wrestling.

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
Publishers, Boston