There is, for all its gaiety, a certain external quality of pathos (now that the German is to us so sinister a figure) in much of _The Pastor's Wife_ (SMITH, ELDER) with its types of an East Prussian village drawn in with those deft, half kindly, half malicious touches to which the creatrix of _Elizabeth_ of the Garden has accustomed us. _Ingeborg_ is the daughter of an English bishop--a bishop, by the way, so needlessly odious that even those who would cheerfully believe the worst of the order must protest against this hitting below the gaiters--and she meets her pastor in a railway carriage on a cheap trip to Lucerne. This so-utterly-by-the-pursuit-of-knowledge-dominated _Herr Dremmel_ (his subject is scientific manure) has a lapse from the even paths of research into the disturbing realms of love, and with an egotistic single-mindedness which is beyond all praise overwhelms her into marriage by the heroic process of ignoring all objections, refusals and obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Koekensee we have a problem! _Elizabeth_, tongue in cheek, in the mask of IBSEN!... I couldn't get myself to believe in the ineffable preoccupations of _Herr Dremmel_ that made so desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting _Ingeborg_ in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the bishop. But I heartily and thoroughly enjoyed the story, the happy little strokes of humour and irony, the apt, pert thumbnail-sketches of the subsidiary characters, the tender love of country things and moods; and saw that I'd been an ass to take it all too seriously. It was written to charm--and it's charming. * * *