Miss RUTH HOLT BOUCICAULT (a name with a double theatrical association) has written, in _The Rose of Jericho_ (PUTNAM), a novel of American stage life which I should suppose comes as near to being a true picture as such stories can. She derives her title from the convenient habit of the desert rose of detaching itself from uncongenial or exhausted soil, subsiding into a compact mass and travelling before the wind to more profitable surroundings. It will be admitted that the author has at least hit upon a picturesque metaphor for a touring company, which on this analogy becomes a very garden of (Jericho) roses. Actually, however, she no doubt intended it to apply more to the disposition of her heroine, and in particular to her power of transferring her young affections, flower, leaf and root, from one object to another, with undiminished enthusiasm. _Sheelah's_ capacity for being off with the old and on with the new is almost preternatural; her progress from stage-child to leading lady is accompanied by such various essays in unconventional domesticity that the reader may well experience a sense of confusion, or at least feel some difficulty in sustaining the first freshness of his sympathy. The story is at times almost startlingly American, as when the original betrayer of the heroine is excused on the ground that, being English, his morality would naturally not rise to native level (I swear I'm not laughing--see page 168); and so full of the idiom of the Transatlantic stage as to be a perfect _vade mecum_ for visiting mimes from this side. For the rest, vivacious, wildly sentimental and obviously written from first-hand experience. * * * * *