Mr. WARD MUIR writes with one eye on the evening papers, and the very title (not to mention the wrapper) of _Adventures in Marriage_ (SIMPKIN) lures us without any sense of difficult transition from the news of the day to the realms of romance. Fifteen stories are contained in this book, of rather unequal length and merit, nearly all of them dealing with a tense situation between husband and wife, several of them calculated to lift the hair, and one or two sufficiently ingenious in mechanism, I should think, to raise a curtain. The adventures are not all unhappy, and the author would seem on the whole to balance the scales fairly evenly between those who desire to reform the Divorce Law and those who would rather reform the world. With the exception of the first the tales are all effectively told and, if the machinery is fairly obvious, it does not click too much. The last on the list is much lengthier than all the others, belonging to the classic magazine school, which ransacks the bowels of the earth for a new and terrible setting. Here the heroine, a beautiful Chinese girl, is discovered by the hero, a missionary, in the cinnabar caverns of Hang Yiu, where the workers have never seen the light of day, are mostly blind and spend the intervals of labour in opium sleep. I like this yarn and recommend it to the attention of anybody who feels that marital squabbles are beginning to pall. * * * * * An excellent purpose will have been served by _German Spies at Bay_ (HUTCHINSON) if it is carefully digested by those scaremongers who during the War insisted that spies were as plentiful as sparrows in Great Britain. Mr. FELSTEAD tells us the truth, and, though it may offer too little of sensationalism for some tastes, it is very comforting to read. The fact is that the spies of the enemy were pounced upon so promptly and had such a harrowing time that both their quantity and quality gradually sank to something very like zero. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the miserable creatures who came spying to this country never had a dog's chance from the word "Go." One cannot waste one's sympathy upon those who for mercenary motives consented to be spies, but I am glad that Mr. FELSTEAD pleads on behalf of such men as CARL LODY. "Some day," he writes, "when the nations of the world grow more sensible, there will be two methods of treating spies. Those who can prove patriotism as the inspiring motive will be dealt with as prisoners of war; the hirelings will be condemned to the death they richly deserve." The rules, as they stand, decreed that LODY had to be shot, but, if he could have received the treatment which brave men have a right to demand all the world over, I do not believe that even the most rabid Germanophobe would in his heart have been sorry. * * * * *