and Other Fanciful Tales," by Frank R. Stockton (Scribners), and "Knitters in the Sun," by Octave Thanet (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), each of which is good in its way. The latter volume affords some excellent examples of the higher type of American magazine stories. Mr. Page's tales celebrate the glories of the old régime in Virginia just before and during the war, which is now receding far enough into history to bring out all its romantic, tender, and chivalrous side, and, oddly enough, the celebrant is in most cases the negro slave whose emancipation was effected by the war. After you have got through the preliminary difficulties of the dialect, which are by no means inconsiderable, you find that Mr. Page has command of both pathos and humor, and can paint the high-souled, impetuous, generous Southerner as well as any one who has ever tried his hand the character; indeed, he once more makes a living and breathing man out of a person who in less competent hands has degenerated into a mere lay-figure. But as yet Mr. Page has evinced no very striking originality. Perhaps his best story is "Polly," which is not in dialect: his worst, and the only poor one in the book, is undoubtedly "No Haid Pawn," which also is not in dialect. A want of originality can never be urged against Frank R. Stockton. He has a delicious twist in his vision that causes him to see everything queer and crooked. He seems to accept in good faith the grotesque and whimsical topsy-turvy land which his vision reveals to him, and he is usually able to make his reader join him. If the reader is refractory he loses a great deal. Stories like "The Fruit of the Fragile Palm" and "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" are delightful extravaganzas if you bend yourself to the writer's mood, and sheer blank nonsense if you don't. But it is something of a strain to continue too long at Mr. Stockton's beck and call. His extreme cleverness wearies you. He is like a firework, brilliant and dazzling to the eye, but affording no enduring light or heat. That is why his longer stories are comparative failures. "The Hundredth Man" (The Century Company), with all its extraordinary wit and fancy, is undeniably tiresome.
We all remember Stockton's amusing story "His Wife's Deceased Sister," in which an author nearly ruins himself by producing a story so good that neither editors nor public will tolerate any inferior fiction from his pen. I cannot help thinking of this in reading W. E. Norris's "Major and Minor." It is a good novel undoubtedly, one of the best novels of the year; but, then, it is by the author of "Matrimony" and "No New Thing." Those two novels, following each other so closely as they did,—coming from an author whose first effort was "Heaps of Money," a clever book, and whose second was "Mademoiselle de Mersac," a still cleverer one, but who now had so distinctly outstripped all his former work,—seemed to give promise that a new writer had arisen who only needed to shake off the natural imitativeness of youth to become a great novelist. These fair hopes have not been realized. Norris's succeeding books have been a disappointment to his admirers. Even "A Bachelor's Blunder," the best of them all, was a decline from "No New Thing." Still, if we cease comparing Norris with himself, we can find much to enjoy in "Major and Minor." The English is as good as ever, the conversations are brilliant and natural, the story is entertaining. The best thing in the book is the heroine. Her wilfulness, her vivacity, her impulsiveness, are strongly set before the reader, and the implacable feminine vindictiveness with which she pursues the Jacob of the book who has deprived Esau of his inheritance (she herself being, without acknowledging it, in love
