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BOOK-TALK.

biography of a Prig,"—"The Venerable Bede" and "How to make a Saint in the English Church" (Henry Holt),—which are full of a pleasant, subacid flavor that only occasionally suggests the acrimony of the recent convert; a new issue of a popular manual on "Philadelphia and its Environs" (J. B. Lippincott Company) which has run through a number of editions and is now brought out in an enlarged, improved, and modernized form that makes a practically new book of it; a sufficiently amusing brochure called "Summer Folks" (Globe Printing House, Philadelphia), which Mr. Burr W. Mcintosh has written and Mr. Henry McCarter has appropriately illustrated; "Colonial Ballads, Sonnets, and other Verse," by Margaret J. Preston (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), a volume of wholesome, hearty verses, the ballads being especially remarkable for their unusual success in reproducing the good old ballad tone; "Legends and Popular Tales of the Basque People," by Mariana Monteiro (A. C. Armstrong & Son), a book which would have been better if the authoress had left the tales to tell themselves, instead of diluting their gold so plentifully with her own tinsel; "Brother against Brother, a Story of the Great Rebellion," by John R. Musick (J. S. Ogilvie & Co.), a badly-conceived, badly-written, badly-printed, and badly-bound novel; "His Star in the East," by Leighton Parks (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), a thoughtful and scholarly study in the early Aryan religions; "Society in the Elizabethan Age," by Hubert Hall (J. B. Lippincott Company), a series of essays descriptive of social life during the second half of the sixteenth century, full of quaint interest and possessing a real archæological value from the new light which the author has succeeded in throwing on persons and things; "Connecticut, a Study of a Commonwealth-Democracy," by Alexander Johnston, and "New York, the Planting and Growth of the Empire State," by Ellis H. Roberts, two additions to the excellent series of "American Commonwealths," which are edited by Horace E. Scudder and published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.; "The Story of the Three Tetons," by Alice Wellington Rollins (Cassell & Co.), a well-imagined story of travel in the Yellowstone regions, with descriptions of scenery all aglow with fine poetical feeling; "Mistaken Paths," by Herbert G. Dick, and "Thekla," by William Armstrong (J. B. Lippincott Company), two rather commonplace novels; "Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle," written and published by Karl Kron (University Building, New York), in which that famous bicycler gives a record of his journeys over the United States, describes the scenery, the condition of the roads, etc., in every locality, and furnishes other details which should make the book invaluable to all who wish to follow in his footsteps—or wheel-tracks, especially as all this mass of information (the author with pardonable pride calls the book "a gazetteer, a dictionary, a cyclopædia, a statistical guide, a thesaurus of facts") has been placed within easy reach of the reader by means of an elaborate system of indexing.