A Bad Penny.

THE romance that lightened the sombre life of the Puritan residents of New England at the beginning of this century helps much to make any story of that time interesting. 'A Bad Penny" is a fascinating presentation of life in a Massachusetts seaport town, in which all the romance of the period has been utilized. We have an old retired sea-captain, with a harum-scarum boy, who also wants to be a sailor. The old gentleman has settled it that his son shall be a minister. There is a prim maiden aunt, to whom the lad is a perpetual torment, and there is a bad sailor brother of hers, who comes back from sea when he was supposed to be dead, and who disturbs the quiet New England household as such bad brothers and uncles have a way of doing. The bad uncle has robbed a hard old deacon in the town thirteen years before, and the deacon chases him to his ship when he finds that the thief is in town. The uncle escapes, and is prevailed on to restore to the deacon the silverware he stole so many years before, and which has been secreted in the neighborhood ever since. The boy, James Woodbury, takes the silver to the deacon's house in the night, and is mistaken for a burglar. Then the boy goes to sea, and fights on the Chesapeake against the British

ship Shannon. Everything ends happily. James marries his own true love, and settles down as a ship-builder, and the reader thinks what a fine fellow he is.

The scapegrace uncle? Oh, he dies as the result of a wound received on the Chesapeake from British boarders. He has the satisfaction of giving his life for his country, and this partly condones his offences against her laws.

The story is told with much spirit. The description of the engagement between the Chesapeake and Shannon is splendid, while in the quiet, domestic scenes, the author proves that he possesses the true story-teller's instinct for making effective contrasts. Every character is well drawn, and the local color is so faithful as to prove that the author knows New England coast towns as they are to-day, which enables him to picture them in the early days of this republic.

While "A Bad Penny "is the sort of book that every healthy boy will devour, it is so well written and has so ingenious a plot that the boy's father will read it, too.

The publishers have given the tale a handsome setting. It is printed on heavy finished paper, in clear type, and bound tastefully in cloth. It is one of the firm's Papyrus Series, and the suggestion of Egyptian literature is

carried out by three of the Pyramids pictured in gold on the cover. The illustrations by F. G. Attwood are exceedingly good. (Lamson, Wolffe & Co. $1.25.-N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.

From" A Bad Penny."

Copyright, 1896, by Lamson, Wolffe & Co.

The Ebbing of the Tide.

"THE Ebbing of the Tide," by Louis Becke, is a set of South Sea stories marked by all the poetic insight and story-telling faculty which

From Crawford's "Bar Harbor."

characterized this author's By Reef and Palm," which was one of the book successes of last year. Mr. Becke is decidedly one of the new writers who claim attention, and this book will go far towards putting him definitely on his feet among the authors who are "worth while." The stories not infrequently remind the reader of Stevenson, not from any want of originality in Mr. Becke, but because these writers have a similar way of looking at life. The stories are mostly brief, and there are over twenty in the volume. There is a singularly high average of merit in them; but a few may be particularized as perhaps standing out beyond their fellows-such as "Lubban of the Pool," "A Dead Loss," "Auriki Reef," and "A Tale of a Mask." Imagination and style are blended in Mr. Becke's work. (Lippincott. $1.25.) Philadelphia Evening Telegraph.

Bar Harbor.

AN element of the picturesque is supplied by an Indian camp, which used for years to be pitched in a marshy field known as Squaw Hol

low; but with the advent of a Village Improvement Society certain new-fangled and disturbing ideas as to sanitary conditions obtained a hearing, and the Indians were banished to a back road out of the way of sensitive eyes and noses. They claim to be of the Passamaquoddy tribe, speak their own language, and follow the peaceful trades of basket-weaving and moccasin-making and the building of birch-bark canoes. Their little dwellings- some of them tents, some of them shanties covered with tar-paper and strips of bark- - are scattered about, and in the shadow of one of them sits a lady of enormous girth, who calls herself their queen, and who wears, perhaps as a badge of sovereignty, a huge fur cap even in the hottest weather. She is not less industrious than other "regular royal" queens, for she sells baskets and tells fortunes even more flattering than the fabled tale of Hope. Some of the young men are fine, swarthy, taciturn creatures, who look as though they knew how to put a knife to other uses than whittling the frame of a canoe; but one does not feel tempted to rush upon Fate for the sake of any of the dumpy and greasylooking damsels who will soon become like their even dumpier and greasier mothers.

The whole encampment is pungent with the acrid smoke of green wood, and many children roll about in close friendship with queer little dogs in which the absence of breed produces a family likeness. It is curious to see in the characteristic work of these people the survival of the instinctive taste of semi-savage races and the total lack of it in everything else. The designs cut on the bark of their canoes are thoroughly good in their way; but contact with a higher civilization seems to have affected them as it has the Japanese, turning their attention chiefly to making napkin-rings and collar-boxes, and to a hideous delight in tawdry finery, which is fondly, though distantly, modelled on current American fashions. (Scribner. 75 c.) From Crawford's "Bar Harbor."

The True Story of Abraham Lincoln. COLUMBUS, the discoverer of our country, and Washington, the father of our countrythese two famous ones has this series of Children's Lives of Great Men recalled for young Americans. Now comes the third and crowning figure in the series-that of Abraham Lincoln, the savior of his country, and, above all others the American.

His story is as marvellous as a fairy-tale, and yet as simple as the truth. Sprung from nothing he rose to the highest eminence, and died a martyr for liberty, Union, and the rights of man. Upon his life, through four terrible years, hung the destinies of this republic and the redemption of a race. To-day the world reveres him as one of the most eminent rulers of any time; the future will yet place him where he rightly belongs-one of the world's greatest men, perhaps the greatest.

For the boys and girls of America brought up in the atmosphere of liberty, of justice, and of patriotism, Abraham Lincoln, the man of the people, has an especial claim to reverence. He stands as a type-as before all others the American.

In the preface to "The True Story of George Washington" the writer quoted for boys and girls a sentiment from one of the noblest of American thinkers and authors, James Russell Lowell. This introduction to

"The True Story of Abraham Lincoln " cannot be more fittingly closed than with the splendid tribute of the same prophetic poet, in his noble " Commemorative Ode," which every boy and girl of America should some day read:

"These all are gone; and standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly, earnest, brave, far-seeing man,

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American."

(Lothrop. $1.50.)-From Preface to Brooks's "The True Story of Abraham Lincoln."

Love Is a Spirit.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE'S new novel, "Love Is a Spirit," is a whimsical affair, yet by no means unserious. No one who has read "Archibald Malmaison" is unacquainted with Hawthorne's marvellous power for touching in just the right way the mysterious regions that lie just beyond the realm of what we call the natural. The supernatural, or quasi-natural, if you will, has for him, as it had for his father, a deep and a fertile fascination. Angus Hugh Strathspey, a married man, separated from his wife-they hate each other-meets a girl, Yolande, on an island in the tropics, and the two fall in love. He conceals from her the fact that he is married, and she confesses her love. Leaving her, he struggles with himself whether he will

marry her, knowing it will be no marriage, and, in revolt at the idea, determines to kill himself. He receives a letter from his wife, written a day or two before her death, and believes he can marry Yolande. Then the memory that he had kissed her when he thought he was a married man makes him understand he is too vile. After a short illness he rides towards Yolande's house in order to tell her the truth. He meets her on horseback, and they talk. After a few hours she vanishes, and he realizes that he has been talking to her spirit, and that she is dead. The book closes with Angus on his knees beside Yolande's body. No other tale by the author is so suggestive of the eerie subtlety of his great father's method and style. (Harper. $1.25.)-Brooklyn Times.

The Verbalist.

A COMPARISON of the second edition of "The Verbalist," that excellent little manual devoted to brief discussions of the right and the wrong use of words, by Alfred Ayres, with the work in its original form, as it appeared in 1882, shows many marked improvements. The number of pages has been increased by more than onehalf, and where the substance of the original text has been retained the wording has been in many cases entirely recast. The author has also greatly added to the value of his book by making free use of illustrative quotations. Sometimes Mr. Ayres finds occasion to modify his earlier opinions: for instance, on page 26 he inserts this suggestive paragraph, after a wholesale denunciation of nouns ending in "ess": "On the other hand there are those that think the use of authoress' should be left to individual tastes. It cannot be denied, however, that we could get on quite as well without it." The two or three pages that Mr. Ayres gives to the subject of " noun construction " are new and timely, and deserve to receive the careful attention of the student of contemporary English. The author seems to have taken something like a malicious pleasure in making up the warning extracts under this heading largely from the columns of that self-confessed champion of linguistic purity, the New York Sun. Another noteworthy feature of this second edition of "The Verbalist" is a full discussion of the use of the relative pronouns; Mr. Ayres is also happily explicit with regard to the employment of the auxiliaries "will" and "would," and he expands the section on "is being built" to a general discussion of "is being." It is pleasant to find that Mr. Ayres, in his pursuit and denunciation of verbal monstrosities and distortions, has not failed to take note of the recent tendencies to use the word "unique" in the sense of "beautiful"; he has

neglected, however, to comment on the unpardonable employment of the phrase "to a degree," or the comparatively recent usage in the newspapers, and even in official documents, of "issuance for issue. One is more than glad to discover that Mr. Ayres still clings to the opinion, so pungently expressed in the first edition of "The Verbalist," that "pants are worn by gents, who eat lunches and open wine, and trousers are worn by gentlemen, who eat luncheons and order wine." There is no more handy, compact, trustworthy, and comprehensive guide to the elements of good English than Mr. Ayres's "Verbalist," and this new and enlarged edition of the book will be cordially welcomed by those who continue to have a regard for sound, expressive, and correct diction. (Appleton. $1.25.)- The Beacon.

THE CONFESSION OF A LIBRARY CLERK.
BY CUPID JONES (pseud. OF FRANCIS S. SALTUS),
EACH day, with locks well oiled, I stand,
A literary Mentor,

And greet with smiles serene and bland
Our patrons as they enter.

'Tis not alone to give a book

To any who demand it, But 'tis the manner and the look And the sweet way I hand it.

And then it is a well-known fact,
When making a selection,

I show a most discerning tact
And judgment in perfection.

So, when old fogies come to get
Of novel new the lightest,

I hand them over Not Dead Yet,
And calmly smile my brightest;

Or vaguely hint of Dead Men's Shoes.
And if they prove not docile,

I give them, for their instant use,
Some treatise on the fossil!

And should my tailor to me bend
And say, "You are my debtor,"
I hand him To the Bitter ^nd,
To make his nature better.

When a rich girl comes in all bent
A passion strong to foster
For some young man without a cent,
I hand her What He Cost Her.

And to all crusty, mean old men,
Who say they'll marry never,
I offer, while I twirl my pen,
The book, Deceivers Ever.

My mind, to make a joke a shade
More witty, has never tarried,
For when I see a gaunt old maid
I give her Safely Married.

And it has always been my forte
To hand out, without shrinking,
A copy new of Wrecked in Port
To old men fond of drinking.

Played Out I give to those whose store
Of gold is lost at euchre,
And Birds of Prey I lay before
Fat brokers gorged with lucre.
And thus the happy days go by,

While I strain brains and fibres
To please the world and satisfy
Our numerous subscribers.

-From the volume called "Fact and Fancy." (Putnam.)

A Voyage to Viking-Land. MR. STEELE sailed from New York on the Normannia and was present at the opening of the Kiel Canal, which was celebrated with great pomp by the war-ships of all nations, before he started on his pleasant tour through VikingLand.

The following pages are all an "introduction" to one of the loveliest countries of the Old World which it has been the pleasure of the writer to visit. It is the itinerary of a most delightful voyage along the coast of Norway of a happy party of tourists, who on pleasure bent were blessed with an excellent steamer, fine weather, good appetites, and a capacity

Copyright, 1890, by Estes & Lauriat.

"MAUD MÜLLER."

for enjoyment only limited by the daily supply which the circumstances offered.

It was like cruising in one's own yacht, without its responsibilities and cares. The glories of the silent fjord, the wonderful glaciers, and the majestic waterfalls were seen to their very best advantage, while few tourists to this region obtain such unobstructed views of the splendors of the midnight sun. With the exception of the portraits, almost all of the illustrations are from photographs taken on the trip, the larger portion from the steamer's deck while sailing through the fjords and along the shores. -(Estes & Lauriat. $2.)- From Steele's "A Voyage to Viking-Land."