In her “Sonny” stories Mrs. Stuart struck the note of original and homely humor to which the popular taste is so quick to respond and for that reason achieved therein her greatest success, but her tales of Creoles and negroes in the Lower Mississippi region have distinctive merit in their vivid and poetic pictures of the great river and its children. To her imagination the Mississippi is not the Father of Waters, but “Old Lady Mississippi,” a witch, a siren, a queen—to fear, to propitiate, and to worship, and to the strength of this conception “The River’s Children” bears striking testimony. The slender thread of story runs almost unnoted among the poetic and picturesque descriptions of the river and the quaint and charming patois of the river people. The great stream sweeps supreme through the book, its poetry, beauty and tragedy looming up larger upon our impression than the magnificence of the Le Ducs or the rather highly colored sketches of Israel and Hannah. Wonderful is the account of Brake Island in its days of fatness culminating in the glories of the famous house-party long ago; and a clever bit of reproduction, at once keen and kindly, is the talk of “Felix” and “Adolphe” on the peril of the rising waters. Not even Cable has caught more perfectly the foreign idiom and softened English of these foreign Americans, or their pleasure-loving, childlike temperament. Mrs. Stuart’s imagination and poetry, like her beloved river, sometimes overflow unhappily, as may be noted in some of the talk between Uncle Israel and Mammy Hannah, where instead of the flash of poetic imagery so characteristic of the negro, Mrs. Stuart gives us sustained and elaborate rhetoric and sentiment. To our perception, too, the story should have ended with the death of the old negro couple, and what follows seems a decline to an anti-climax. Mrs. Stuart is fully imbued with the traditions of the lordly, lavish life of the old Creole days, and she knows and loves the land of the Lower Mississippi. The result has been seen in some charming and vivid sketches of which “The River’s Children” ranks among her best. RETURN: a Story of the Sea Islanders in 1739. By Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke. L. C. Page and Company, Boston. Price, $1.50. This is an extremely hollow piece of literary labor, with seemingly no other inspiration than Mary Johnson’s romances. There is no atmosphere wherefrom incident or characters could draw any vital semblance, and the style is the thinnest and stalest decoction of Miss Johnson’s manner and diction. It is to be hoped that the writers will once for all forswear the field of colonial history and romance, and return to their own—the life they know and can describe so well in Texas and Tennessee. THE FIDDLE AND THE BOW. By Robert L. Taylor. PART SECOND.