There is no lack of excitement in Mr. Hough’s latest novel—intrigue, mystery, villainy, a negro uprising, a Mississippi overflow—these succeed each other rapidly and bewilderingly, and there is “something doing” in every chapter. The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,—“the richest region on the face of the whole earth,” “the heart of the only American part of America”—and the race question in its intensest and most picturesque form is the theme of the book. From a dramatic and artistic standpoint, the theme and the setting are well chosen, and in the description of the negro gathering in the forest at the call of the savage drum and the half-hinted horrors of the revenge of the whites, there is the unmistakable thrill of literary power and skill. The conventional hero is a railroad claim agent, rather an original role for a Southern hero of romance, and a thoroughly good fellow he is, but the masterpiece of characterization is that of Colonel Calvin Blount of the Big House,—rough, brave, chivalrous, lordly, ruling over his wide acres with the imperious will and open-handed generosity of a feudal baron. His trial for murder in a lynching case is the culminating point of the book, and Eddring’s speech in his defense presents the author’s solution of the race problem in the South. “The law of the land” must be transgressed sometimes in the letter that it may be kept in the spirit, and Colonel Blount is acquitted of the murder which he committed in view of the horrors which negro rule would bring to Southern civilization. There is nothing new or profound in Mr. Hough’s treatment of the race problem, but in presenting it as it exists in the lower South in its most extreme form, he has availed himself of excellent material for dramatic romance. To the average American the life to which Mr. Hough introduces us in “The Law of the Land” will seem as strange and foreign as a glimpse into the jungles of Africa, but it is real, if exceptional, and Mr. Hough’s vivid picture may disturb the academic theories of New England to some extent. Had the author spared us the treatise on the race problem as embodied in Eddring’s defense of Colonel Blount, the novel would have been lightened by so much dead weight of argument and rhetoric. As it is, “The Law of the Land,” leaving out the tinselly plot on which the heroine’s identity and fortune depend, is a good story of dramatic power, picturesque description, and strong characterization. THE MASTER-WORD. A Story of the South To-day. By L. H. HAMMOND. The Macmillan Company, New York. Price, $1.50.