SOME RECENT FICTION

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2970, 6 January 1917, Page 11

SOME RECENT FICTION

"Salt and Savour," Bronda Muller, daughter of a German merchant in Loudon, a man who left 'his.native.country at twenty, and has become completely Anglicized, marries a German cousin, Lothar, who comes to London to visit his connections, and, incidentally, to do a little sketching (of military interest) and indulge in espionage generally. In "Salt ancl Savour" (Mothuen and Co.) practised novelist, Mrs. Alfred Sedgwick, who thoroughly knows Germany and tho German people, tells us of the sad disillusionment of poor Bronda when she marries her Prussian officer, and makes intimate acquaintance with the horribly vulgar Erdmanu family. She had dreamt of the old-time Germany, "in which a stork's nest and a church tower looked along the sleepy years at troops of little fair-haired children playing, learning, working, living, and dying in tho fear of God." But in her new home in a Berlin flat, "in a vulgar, florid house with gokled balconies, castellated turrets, and on oitbor side of the front door two colossal figures made of red brick," she discovers an entirely new Germany, tbo latter-day Germany of "Kultiir" and arrogant militarism, and she is very miserable, poor girl. Fortunately tho objectionable Lothar ends by being shot' in the Tower as a spy, having made tho sad mistake of imagining that English officialdom is as blind duriug tho war as it was before that cataclysm was decreed by the arch-assassin of Europe, and the heroine tlien rewards her old lover, Andrew Lovcl, a. young Cornishman, who had gone to New Zealand, but returns to do his "bit" at the front, for his patient and never-failing devotion. A very well told and readable story.

"The Roundabout." The Yorkshire uovels of J. E. Buckrose (Mrs. Falconer Jameson) aro always welcome, being simply told, wholesome stories, often with a Miss Mitford or Jane Austen flavour about them, and always very readable. "Tho Roundabout" (llodder and Stoughtou, per Whitcoinbe and Tombs) is tho latest successor to the well-remembered "Down Our Street." It is a story of middle-class family lifo'at Elodmouth, an easily identiliable Yorkshire port, and deals with the contrast provided by a mother who is typically mid-Vic-torian in her tastes and prejudices, and two of bov daughters, who take their mental colour from her, and a. third daughter, who disdains snobbery and insists upon marrying a young carriage painter. Nevertheless, when the revolted one's turn comes to deal with a wayward daughter, who insists upon adopting a nurse's career, the inherited prejudices crop np. "Oh, Dorothy, you can't mean it. You are bored with n dull afternoon, and speaking at random. We must find something for you to do." "Embroidering flowers on linen, like Aunt Grace," retorts the girl. "No, thank you. Life is meant for more than that, mother." Towards the end of the story the war "comes in,

and all tho Taylors, young and old, | krgely modify their views on life. "The Adventures of Juditfi Lee." That popular writer, Richard Marsh, has achieved tho apparently impossible in securing an entirely new variant of the well-worn. Sherlock Holmes type. His detective is a lady, a lady with Romany blood in her veins, and gifted with extraordinary power of knowing what people arc saying to each other, oven at a considerable distance, simply by watching the movements of their lips. In '"Hie Adventures of Judith Leo" (Mctluicn and Co.), Mr. Marsh .gives us nine separate stories of remarkable incidents in the career of Miss Lee, who bowls out international swindlers, discovers the perpetrators of forgeries, murders, and other crimes, with quite astounding facility. The stories, once the peculiar gift of the heroine is accepted as possible, make capital reading for a spare hour or two.