we have pictures of English country life of surpassing loveliness; we have an episode as warm and as fleeting as June itself; we have a faithful analysis of the soul of a strange and solitary man, damned from his birth by lack of decision. But the crisis in the tale is brought about by an accident so improbable that the reader refuses to believe it. The moment our author forsakes reality he is lost; it is as necessary for him to keep the truth as it was for Samson to keep his hair. Furthermore, this is the only one of Mr. Marshall's books that has a tragic close--and his art cannot flourish in tragedy, any more than a native of the tropics can live in Lapland. The bleak air of lost illusion and frustrated hope, in which the foremost living novelist, appropriately named, finds his soul's best climate, is not favourable to Archibald Marshall. The "relapse" mentioned in the preceding paragraph occurred in the year 1912, when he published a long and wildly exciting novel, called _The Mystery of Redmarsh Farm_. This has all the marks of a "best-seller" and went through several editions in England, though it has not yet been reprinted in America. I regard the writing of this book as the most dangerous moment in Mr. Marshall's career, for its immediate commercial success might easily have tempted him to continue in the same vein, and if he had, he would have sunk to the level of a popular entertainer, and lost his position among British novelists of the past and present. Curiously enough, it came between two of his best works in the Clinton series, _The Eldest Son_ (1911) and _The Honour of the Clintons_ (1913). Maybe the chilling reception given to his finest stories drove him to a cheaper style of composition. Maybe his long second visit to Australia, where he saw and shared experiences quite unlike his English environment, made him try his hand at mystery and crime. In 1911 he had published _Sunny Australia_, the result of a sojourn on that continent, whither he had gone as special commissioner for the _Daily Mail_. There is a good deal of superficial cleverness in _The Mystery of Redmarsh Farm_; its plot is elaborate, with a flavour of _Lohengrin_; the beautiful lonely maiden's young brother is stolen by a villain and rescued by a young hero who is appropriately named Knightly; a misunderstanding separates the girl and her lover, who sails away to Australia. Unlike Lohengrin, however, he returns, and all is well. There is a conventional detective, and a murder trial and a shipwreck and a recognition scene--I kept looking back to the title page to see if the author really was Archibald Marshall. It is as though Joseph Conrad should write like Marie Corelli. Yet although some of the characters are unreal and the plot artificial and the villain theatrical, the environment, whether in England or in Australia, is as accurately painted as in Mr. Marshall's best stories. He will not write of places that he has not seen.