The dry sticks, as it were, of _The Bale Fire_ (HUTCHINSON) are not very cunningly laid, with the result that from a spectacular point of view the conflagration fizzles out rather tamely. But there are so many bright passages in the book and so many sympathetic sketches of characters that I cannot help wishing the FRASERS (HUGH and MRS.) had either written a longer story depending completely on the interplay of temperament, or else built more carefully on their melodramatic substructure. For though _Captain Mayhune_, the villain of the piece, is the proprietor of a gaming-hell and terrorises _Lady Trague_ with a piece of blotting-paper on which may be read a portion of her letter to a young man whom she indiscreetly though innocently adores, nothing very serious comes of his machinations, and our interest in the book is mainly confined to the emotional relations between _Sir Charles_, a fussy elderly martinet, his too young wife, and _Maisie_, her seventeen-year-old step-daughter, who varies from deeper moods to those of a silly and self-willed child. Then there is _Captain Mayhune_ himself, a man of good impulses and evil, in whom, somehow or other, though never without a struggle, the evil always triumphs. Other characters are rather jerkily introduced, amongst whom a family of good-natured and thoroughly "nice" Americans, who help to straighten things out and bring people to a better understanding, are most conspicuous. But that piece of blotting-paper! If I were a stationer and kept a circulating library, I think I should try to turn an honest penny by selling sand to my customers along with their packets of linen-wove and blue-black writing-fluid. "Simple, effective, and leaves no chance to the blackmailer." * * * * *