cheap washing, which necessitates limp collars and mussy shirt-bosoms, an entire absence of buttons, no beer for dinner or supper, and merely bread and butter for breakfast. This is realism of the bitter sort; but one enjoys from the first the consoling thought that virtues like those which Dick displays in his unselfish love for his little sisters are sure to be rewarded. Indeed, more than poetic justice is meted out: the aunt and uncle who have used Dick and his little sisters unkindly lose both their children by scarlet fever, Tip Cat, the good genius of the story, although in no way related to Dick Whittington's cat or Puss in Boots, comes to the rescue of the orphans, and the book ends like a fairy-tale. It is a pleasant little book, but, like "Miss Toosey's Mission" and "Laddie," by the same author, it is mawkish in sentiment and made up of the fag-ends of all the goody stories of the past half-century.
No boys, of whatever age, or lovers of boys, of whatever sex, will fail to find amusement in "Two Compton Boys," which is indeed such a transcription of the joyous pranks of youthful existence as one rarely meets with. All the impulses of healthy boyish life are allowed fair play, yet the frontier line between what is worthy and lovable and what is wilful and wrong is not once passed. The fun is fast and furious, and of a kind to provoke endless reminiscences in the reader's mind of escapades of a similar description. As an artist, Mr. Hoppin has a knack of hitting off characteristic people and their doings, and none of his designs have been better than the illustrations of this volume. And his rules of art as an author are as simple but as effective as those which govern his pencil. He aims at nature and reality, and his narrative is direct and explicit, with an unfailing healthiness of moral tone and humorous play.
Sherwood Bonner was not only the possessor of a very happy literary faculty, she had also a gift which, according to modern canons, must perhaps be termed unliterary, but which stood her in no less stead,—the power of telling a good story. Her tales have the vigor and terseness of the best viva voce narration; yet this spontaneity is the result of careful workmanship, and betrays none of the awkwardness or ineffectiveness into which inexperienced writers are apt to fall in their attempts to import everyday realism directly and rawly into print. Nowhere even in "Uncle Remus" is there a better reproduction of the graphic style of narrative in which the colored race excel than in the two stories told here by "Gran'mammy" to a circle of young auditors. The subjects are drawn not from the peculiar folk-lore of the black people, but from the recollections which they know how to detail with equal effect. Gran'mammy's account of "The Night the Stars Fell" is weird and impressive, while her reminiscence of stealing and eating a cake while a child is irresistibly funny. This story-telling faculty, combined as it was with a steadily ripening artistic sense, could hardly have failed, had Sherwood Bonner lived and continued to write, to win for her a wide popularity. Her stories have already counted their rustic as well as their literary admirers, and given delight to readers of such diverse tastes and associations as are rarely found in one audience. The young folks who enjoy these "Suwanee River Tales" will wish there were more of them, and readers of our periodical literature who have noted the promise and charm of Sherwood Bonner's stories may well regret that they are so few.
Books Received.
