THE READER'S COLUMN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 166, 30 November 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE READER'S COLUMN.

(By James Wortley). XOTES. The "Lotus Library" is a capital pocket edition in limp cloth of translations from the French. It is published by Greening and Co., London (our copies are from the 8.K.). and includes, among others, works of the following writers: Daudet, Alexander Dumas, Flambert, Gautier, Bourget and Ohnct. For those who wish to familiarise themselves with the best French fiction, it is here provided in a handy and inexpensive form. The October issue of the Bookman is the usual autumn double number, and is devoted chieltv to Whistler. The two writers dealt with iiri the "Gallery" are "lan Hay" and Xonnan Angell. Messrs Constable have just issued the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the famous Australian poet, in a half-crown edition. It is edited by Douglas Sladen. The papers on Hark Twain by Albert Bigelow Paine, running through Harper's, make good reading. The October issue is of more than usual interest to book lovers. It records, for one, Kipling's first visit to Clemens. When Kipling called Mark was away, and the card he presented to Susy was marked Allahabad, which to the child was fairyland. Mark Twain comments as follows: "Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it an additional value in Susy's eyes, since as a distinction it was the next thing to being recognised by a denizen of the moon. Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me—and the honors wer.e easy. I believed that he knew more than any person I had ever met, and I knew he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before, though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he had gone Mrs. Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said: "He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man, and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.'" Mark Twain on Browning: "One's glimpses and confessions as one reads Browning remind me of looking through a telescope (the small sort you must move with your hand, not clockwork). You toil across empty spa-ces which are (to your lens) empty; but every now and then a splendo of stars and suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame." From a Stevenson's letter to Clemens: !; Mv father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read 'Roughing It' (his usual amusement being found in theology). and after one evening spent with the book he declared. 'I am frightened. It cannot be safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.'" i

XEW NOVELS.

•"The Oakum Pickers," by L. S. Gibson (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd.)

After reading this book one wonders what excuse there can have been for writing such a story of morbid sentimentality. Surely literature should exhibit hope and faith in some degree, how ever small. How many of us would adorn our walls with pictures depicting pain and suffering and despail'? There may bo such, but we do not look to them for inspiration. Neither is it needful that we look to prose pictures of despair for help or recreation. The story is of two women, both unhappily married, and gives us most distressing details of their consequent mental anguish. After both being disappointed, on the death of their first husbands, with the steadfastness of their respective lovers, these two otherwise normally healthy and well-favored women are left at an early age, with lives blighted. The whole thing is preposterous and unnatural. The hook is not poisonous; it is merely morbid and depressing. The writer is surely capable of more rational w«vk.

*The .Just and the Unjust," by Vaughan Keater, author of "The Prodigal Judge." (Indianopolis: The BobbsMerrill Company). 1 A well-tohl tale. The characters are well conceived, and conduct themselves naturally. The scene is a typical small town of the Eastern States, and the hero, through circumstantial evidence, falls under suspicion for murder. Two enemies, one of whom is the real criminal, do what they can to secure his committal, which is after a long trial accomplished. Readers will find out for themselves the manner in which justice is finally meted out to those deserving of it, and the retribution that overtakes the guilty. Throughout, Elizabeth Herbert is the constant woman we expect her to be, .and one whose unfaltering trust in John North meets its due reward. (*o'ur copies for review are forwarded by the B.K. bookshop).