"Yellowstone Nights" by Herbert Quick narrates the adventures of seven people who meet for the first time in Yellowstone Park and who join their interests, and commit themselves to the care of Aconite Driscoll, the driver of a stage, who acts as their guide to the wonders of the Park. Each evening it falls to the lot of some member of the party to tell a story for the entertainment of the rest. The stories are of uneven interest, but contain some clever writing. One wishes the author had eliminated the slang, which is furnished ad nauseam, presumably to give Western "color" but which detracts much from some otherwise readable stories. The descriptions of Yellowstone Park have a guide-book flavor, although one would not accuse the author of not knowing his country. Bobbs-Merrill Co.

The spirit in which John Muir's "My First Summer in the Sierra" was written is suggested by these words which one comes upon more than midway in the narrative: "No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." It was in this spirit that Mr. Muir, who has been aptly called the Thoreau of the far West, wandered forty years ago and more among the mountains and cañons, the rivers and lakes of the Yosemite, watching the two thousand sheep of which he was in charge; and it is in this

spirit that the diary of his experiences and observations from June to September is recorded in these pages. The book is one of the most virile and most enthusiastic contributions to Nature lore for many a day. The illustrations are in part from photographs and in part from sketches made by the author. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Two historical stories deserving unqualified praise are Marjorie Bowen's "I Will Maintain" and "Defender of the Faith." Either is complete alone, but they are doubly satisfactory read together, both being stories of the Netherlands during the period of William III. Contrary to the custom of fiction-writers, the author has taken the historical characters themselves for her chief actors instead of using them as part of her background, and William of Orange and John DeWitt are wonderfully real in her pages, and compel the reader's admiration with almost the power of life itself. She enters with remarkable impartiality into the differences between the young Prince and the Grand Pensionary, and does equal justice to the disinterestedness and heroism of both.

The first

of these two stories is concerned with the rise of the Prince to command of the army, his gallant struggle against French aggression, and his triumpant acclaim as Stadtholder. The book is of absorbing interest, a fact the more marked as it is wholly without the element of romance. That element, however, enters largely into the second, which begins with the negotiations for William's marriage with Mary Stewart, and weaves domesticities with wars in deft fashion, covering a period ending with the battle of Saint Denis. Both books are of unusual quality. E. P. Dutton & Co.

"The many-eyed and many-winged hosts, named in the Hebrew tongue Cherubim and Seraphim. the appellation of Seraphim plainly teaches their ever moving about things divine, their constancy, warmth, keenness, and the seething of that persistent, indomitable, inflexible motion But the appellation of the Cherubim denotes their knowledge and their vision of God."-Dionysius the Areopagite.

The burning seraphs, of created things
Most near to thee;
These are all wings.
They cannot see

Thy face, so close they are to thy Divinity.

They soar within thy light,

Plunge through the rushing river of thy grace;

To them it is a night
Fulfilled of ecstasy,

Where loved and lover meet in love's embrace.

President Taft had hardly uttered what Sir Edward Grey on March 13 described as the "bold and courageous words" of his proposals relative to the settlement of "matters of national honor" by Courts of Arbitration when I received from one of the makers of opinion in the United States the following appeal:

What is now wanted is a calm and fair interpretation of the prevailing opinion in France to-day with regard to disarmament, and especially with regard to the recent proposals of Sir It Edward Grey and President Taft. would seem as if France would naturally be the next nation to come into line. Why not register the pulse of the French people on these ethical and spiritual matters.

The view expressed by my distinguished correspondent, "it would seem as if France would be the next nation to come into line," is not surprising. France is, no doubt, a Power interested, and even supremely interested, in "ethical and spiritual matters." What the English-speaking world chiefly knows of France is her idealism -the date of 1789, the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Revolution with the Walkyrie dash of the Republican armies over the toppling thrones of Europe, and the mystic words which were the deeper undertone of the Marseillaise: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. the couples with that knowledge recollection of the doctrinaire policies of the Réveur Couronné of the Second Empire, who was to the succor ready to rush fallen nationalities and who claimed thereby to be prolonging the democratic war-cry of the volunteers of the Revolution. And finally, the English-speaking world, face to face with

It

ever

of

the forty years of the Third Republic, admires the altruism of her political philosophy of "solidarity"-in reality, a dream of the Masonic inspirers of that Republic-her magnificent tenyears battle for Right against Raison d'Etat in the great drama of the Dreyfus case, her constant urbane attitude of conciliation (“L'Adaptation des Alliances"), her diplomatic intervention at moments of tension between the Powers (the "Dogger Bank"), and her undeviating loyalty to the ideal that maintains the Tribunal of The Hague.

This is the France-which is only one, and not the whole, France-which is visible from over the sea and from over the Channel; but it is a France of mirage; and if that mirage has often duped and lured the "Anglo-Saxon" or the Levantine vision, it has never victimized the sceptical scrutiny of the Powers of the Continent. There is quite another France and even more real France, the France that has evolved not on some distant Atlantis, nor yet upon an island separated by the estranging sea from intimate Continental contacts. There is the France that has all along formed an integral part of Continental European soil. to That France, in order remain abreast of the fashion of the hour, may vote platonic resolutions in favor of disarmament-calling upon the Government "to exert every effort to place upon the programme of work at the next Hague Conference, in agreement with the friendly and allied Powers, the question of the simultaneous limitation of armaments" (February 23)— but the same France notes with singular satisfaction the cautious and luke warm character of the terms in which the British Sovereign-addressing the Lord Mayor on April 30, after the Guildhall Meeting of the 28th held to

I

On May 9 the news reached Paris and Berlin late in the evening that the Provincial Committee of the Reichsland, the Délégation d'Alsace-Lorraine, had that afternoon been prorogued. The Cabinet order of the Emperor dissolving this Assembly was dated May 6, the first day of the Emperor's visit to Alsace, and it was issued from Strasbourg. Forty-eight hours later the Alsace-Lorraine Constitution and Finance Bills were rejected by the Committee of the Reichstag. Commenting on the confusion that reigned in the Committee prior to the rejection of these measures the Berlin correspondent of the Times observed: "Now, as so often, one is tempted to believe that most people in Berlin and throughout the greater part of the German Empire know no more about Alsace-Lorraine than about the German colonies, if indeed they know as much." Paris, France in general, are fortunately better informed.

There is a certain historical document which may have been forgotten in Berlin, which no doubt is little known in London and in Washington, but which, if it does not yet figure, as it ought to figure, on the walls of every French school, is still fresh in the memories of most Frenchmen. It is the unanimous Declaration of the Deputies of the French Departments of the BasRhin, the Haut-Rhin, the Moselle, the Meurthe, and the Vosges protesting against the alienation of Alsace-Lorraine, and affirming the immuable volonté of the population of these two Provinces to remain Frenchmen. One hundred and seven members of the National Assembly-among whom were the actual President of the French Chamber of Deputies and the M. Clemenceau who avenged M. Delcassé at 'Casablanca-voted against the preliminaries of peace ceding Alsace and a portion of Lorraine to Germany. They had been moved to assume this sublime responsibility by the perusal of such passages as follow-and it would be a crime not to preserve the original language of the Declaration:

Europe ne peut permettre ni ratifier l'abandon de l'Alsace et de la Lorraine. Gardiennes des règles de la justice et du droit des gens, les nations civilisées ne sauraient rester plus longtemps insensibles au sort de leur voisine, sous peine d'être à leur tour victimes des attentats qu'elles auraient tolérés. L'Europe moderne ne peut laisser saisir un peuple comme un vil troupeau; elle ne peut rester sourde aux protestations répétées des populations menacées; elle doit à sa propre conservation d'interdire de pareils abus de force. Elle sait d'ailleurs que l'unité de la France est aujourd'hui, comme dans le passé, une garantie de l'ordre général du monde, une barrière contre l'esprit de conquête et d'invasion. "La paix faite au prix d'une cession de territoire ne serait qu'une trève ruineuse et non une paix définitive. Elle serait pour tous une cause d'agitations intes