NEW BOOKS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 24, 21 September 1912, Page 5

NEW BOOKS.

o “Dll. TUPPY.” A held little explored by writers of fiction is dealt with by Mr. Stephen Townsend in his “Hr. Tuppy,” which reaches us from Messrs. Whitcombe and Tombs. It is a novel dealing with Hospital life in a great centre, and gives us pictures humorous and pathetic, with a line knowledge of the inside of tilings. “Hr. Tuppy,” a Hospital dresser, is an abnormality, in many ways. Chivalrous to a degree, inordinately ungainly, easily imposed spoil and dreadfully near-sighted, it is not wonderful that he should become a butt for the students and oifi■ers of the hospital, who play some sad jokes upon poor Tuppy. To give zest to their rough ragging of this sadly out-of-placc student, lie very .penly falls in love with a nurse—Bella los sop—and his follow-dressers make the most of it. The book is brightly vritten, and Tuppy’s love passages ire appealing in the extreme. The lady •10 honours was not oven startlingly pretty, for the author tolls his readers “there was a peculiar obliquity of the linos of. her face that expressed a ■aptiousuoss totally at variance with the real amiability of her character.” But on the other hand: “To Tuppy from the first moment that ho sa-w her die was, and she always remained, the most beautiful creature on earth. There arc compensations in everything, and The compensation of Tupoy’s incurable astigmatism was that it exactly corrected the defects if Nurse Tossop’s face, whilst bis partial colourblindness transformed her auburn hair into a halo of burnished <mlfl.” And so the fancy runs through many pigrs. ai the hospital and at Tuppy’s home, hut alwavtj readable and onaint.