"A modern woman, with an inordinate amount of emotional vanity transplanted to her intellect, consumed and devoured by a curiosity to sound her own and other people's emotional depths, to test her magnetism," is the heroine of Marie Louise Van Saanan's three-sided story, "The Blind Who See." Nora's lover is "the type of man who always fascinates such a woman, a superb egoist and something of a brute," and the blind musician, her husband-high-minded, generous and trusting-is not able to hold her wavering fancy, though after a period of unfaithfulness she returns to him. The story is told with distinction, and is marked by great emotional power and an unusual cleverness at description. One moment in particular, that of Nora's entrance into a room on a winter afternoon, is as clear cut and real as one's memory of the candles in the grove on the night of the duel in "The Master of Ballantrae." The Century Co.

By all odds one of the best boys' books of the season is "The Boy with the U. S. Census" by Francis RoltWheeler, the third volume in what is called the "U. S. Service Series" (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.) The book is full of accurate information about this important department of the government service, and will therefore commend itself to benevolent older people who have their own ideas about the kind of books a boy ought to like to read; but it is also full of lively and diverting incident, which will commend it to the boys themselves quite as much as if it were wholly fiction. The youth who figures in it as a censustaker is shifted from one point to another in the course of his work, and becomes cognizant of conditions among the ex-slaves and the mountain whites of the South, the newly-arrived immigrants, and the "Black Hand" in New

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York. All that he witnesses and experiences is graphically told and there are no dull pages. There are thirtyeight illustrations, many of them from government sources.

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Robert Hichens is acknowledged to have made for himself a unique place in fiction. "The Fruitful Vine," his latest work, is proof of his increasing maturity as a writer, as well as of his power of insight into character. artistic delineator of emotion and passion, he so deals with his characters that every act of their external lives seems typical and symbolic of the struggles within. Many feel his methods too intimate, but there are others to whom his almost photographic record of inner life is very appealing. The theme of this last novel is an intense love and longing for little children, and the effect of this feeling upon the lives of Sir Theodore Canynge and Dolores his wife, who are childless. The scene is Rome, of the present day, and very interesting pen pictures of life there are given. Beautiful and striking is a frontispiece in colors of the Eternal City, by Jules Guerin. Such a book is bound to excite interest. Some readers will be greatly drawn to it, while others will greatly dislike it; but none will be indifferent. Frederick A. Stokes Co.

Most interesting and timely is the book by Sue Ainslee Clark and Edith Wyatt, entitled "Making Both Ends Meet." It is a remarkable collection of reports made by various individuals for the National Consumer's League. Much of the material has appeared in different numbers of McClure's Magazine. The reports are economic records of self-supporting women living away from home in New York. There are two methods of investigating economic conditions. One is to simply compile figures and facts, as in census-taking;

and the other is to gather the humaninterest story, of which latter method much of our journalism is an example. The women who made these investigations tried to combine the two methods -they obtained a background of facts and interpreted them by means of dramatic stories. The investigators actually shared the lives of the working-girls, in laundries, factories and stores, supporting themselves on the wages received at the time. An especially pertinent chapter is the one which deals with the Shirt-Waist Makers' Strike. The record as a whole cannot fail to arouse a sincere and more intelligent interest in conditions of which many are but dimly aware. The Macmillan Company.

Admirers of the prose and verse of the late Edmund Clarence Stedman will extend a warm welcome to the volume "Genius and Other Essays" gathered after his death and now published by Moffat, Yard & Co. All of Mr. Stedman's work, the critical not less than the creative, was marked by admirable poise and self-restraint. He did not belong to the type of writers who write for the mere pleasure of writing or labor under the delusion that an eager public is waiting to hear what they may have to say. He wrote too little rather than too much,-with an excess of deliberation rather than a want of it; a fault, if it is a fault, easily forgiven because it is so rare. The essays included in the present volume cover a wide range, in subject and in date. Some of them date back to the sixties, the latest was written in 1904. But all are marked by Mr. Stedman's familiar characteristics. They are well-considered, discriminating, generous, and written in the clear, scholarly style which lent such an enduring charm to his "Victorian Poets." Time laughs at critics, and sometimes flouts their decisions and reverses their

try, France.

The present volume, which

is complete in itself, contains the third, fourth and fifth books; they tell of a boorish young German, a real musician, who comes to Paris and for long finds himself moved only to rage and disgust by and the professionals wealthy dilettantes he meets. In this book "The Market Place," the author is strong and glories in his strength; he analyzes every aspect of the worst side of French life and lets Christophe rail at it. Then, in "Antoinette," comes a tenderly sympathetic account of the life of a little governess who in Germany had been protected by Christophe and secretly loves him. The story of her life is profoundly moving, true in every emotion and turn of phrase. Olivier, her brother, becomes after her death Christophe's friend and the last book is devoted to their friendship and their life in a typical French house. The author has the vision and the humanity of a master; his French facility and intellectual agility do not shut him out from the portrayal of simple, strong emotion and keen understanding, without a trace of cynicism, of human motives and failings. JeanChristophe is a stimulation and pleasure; the American public will look eagerly for the translation of the rest of the novel cycle. Henry Holt & Co.

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