Dippers who have given a new meaning to the classical motto, _Respice finem_, are so common amongst novel readers that Patricia Wentworth will only have herself to thank if many who are unfamiliar with her work fail to do justice to a book nine-tenths of which is thoroughly interesting and excellently well-written. As a boy, the hero of _Simon Heriot_ (Melrose) is misunderstood, and although _Mr. Martin_, his step-father, is a somewhat stagey specimen of the heavy and vulgar papa, the child's emotions (as, for instance, when he pretends that the storm of his parent's wrath is the ordeal of the Inquisition or some far-away battle of paladins in which he is contending) are finely conceived, and many of the later passages in _Simon's_ life--his unhappy love affair with _Maud Courtney_, his relations with his grandmother and with _William Forster_, the schoolmaster--are quite engrossing and give occasion for memorable sketches of character. It is when the natural end of the story is reached, and _Simon_ has come into his own and has just been wedded to his proper affinity, that the structure seems to me to fall with a crash. I might perhaps, though not without reluctance, have pardoned an impertinent railway accident which leaves the young man apparently crippled for life, but the last chapters, in which he finds spiritual comfort and (after the doctors have given up hope) complete anatomical readjustment through the ministrations of faith healing, alienated me entirely. From the outset the obvious scheme of the novel is to bring the hero back happily to the home and, if you will, the rustic church of his ancestors; and, though the science of Christian healing may do all that its adherents claim for it, it has about as much to do with the case of _Simon Heriot_ as the dancing dervishes or the rites of Voodoo.