Miss Cleveland has gathered a large audience, and it is a satisfaction to feel in reading her book that she holds her place before them with invariable good sense, high faith, and a dignity which commands respect. "Aulnay Tower." By Blanche Willis Howard. Boston: Ticknor & Co. There is a good situation in "Aulnay Tower," but the book may be said to be all situation, with little movement, no development, and the very slightest free play of character and motive. The scene is laid at the château of the Marquis de Montauban, not far from Paris, at the moment in the Franco-German war when Sedan had been fought, the emperor was a prisoner, and the Germans were investing the capital. The marquis, his niece the Countess Nathalie de Vallauris, and his chaplain the Abbé de Navailles, in spite of orders from General Trochu, have remained at this country-seat, apparently indifferent to passing events. Thus it is a rude awakening when they find the Germans knocking at the castle doors and demanding entertainment for the officers of the Saxon grenadiers, who are quartered upon them during most of the time occupied by the siege of Paris. Here, then, is the situation. The Countess Nathalie, a widow of twenty-three, "a beautiful woman, young, pale, fair-haired, stately and forbidding," confronts these invaders of her private peace and enemies of her country, intending to freeze them by her haughtiness, her indifference, her disdain, but carries away even from the first encounter a haunting and rankling recollection of a tall man in blue; while the tall man in blue, Adjutant von Nordenfels, "from the moment she stood before the officers in her cold protest and unrelenting pride," was madly in love with the countess. The feelings of these two young people being thus from the first removed from the region of doubt and conjecture, what few slight obstacles contrive to separate them for a time carry little weight with the reader. There is a dearth of incident which the side-play of the coquettish maid, Nathalie's _femme-de-chambre_, fails to relieve. The marquis and Manette are the traditional nobleman and soubrette, and flourish before us all the adjuncts of the stage. We give a fragment from a soliloquy of Manette's which suggests the foot-lights and an enforced "wait" in a comedy during a change of dress for the principal actors: "I adore Countess Nathalie, and am thankful for my blessings. And yet I have my disappointments, my chagrins. To-day, for example, what a field for genius! what a chance for never-to-be-forgotten impressions! A dozen officers! Not a woman in Aulnay but madame and me. Oh, just heaven, what possibilities! My rich imagination dressed us both in the twinkling of an eye. For the Countess Nathalie gentle severity was the key-note of my composition,--heavy black silk, of course. There it lies. Elegance and dignity in the train. Happy surprises in the drapery. Fascination in the sleeves.