It has ever been my misfortune that the presence in a story of two characters confusably alike, or a setting within drowning distance of a tide-race, will produce in me an almost insuperable sense of its having been "made on purpose." I had therefore a double stroke of bad luck in finding both these elements present in _The Splendid Fairing_ (MILLS AND BOON). But the more credit to Miss CONSTANCE HOLME that, despite my increasing conviction that the wrong prodigal would return, and that the powers of nature were throughout almost visibly preparing to engulf him, the gentle and unforced power of her story did hold my attention till the final wave. Distinction shown in apparent absence of effort would, I think, be my verdict on her writing; she clearly knows her Northern farmer-folk with the sympathy of intimate experience. I hope I have not already suggested too much of the plot, a little tragedy of the commonplace dealing with the relations between two farming brothers, of whom the younger prospers while the elder fails, and the life-long jealousies of their women. Miss HOLME works, one may say, on a minute scale; the short but simple annals of the poor interest her to the extent of providing an entire volume of three hundred odd pages from the events of a single day. But though now and then the old Northern counsel to "get eendways wi' it" does hover in the background of one's mind I repeat that sincerity carries the thing through. For all that, however, _The Splendid Fairing_ did but confirm me in a previous impression that these Mary-call-the-cattle-home localities must remain more convenient to the local colourist than attractive to the inhabitants. * * * * * The publication, as a foreword, of a "Glossary of Native Words" used in the text made me wonder whether I should be bored or instructed, or both, by _The Death Drum_ (HURST AND BLACKETT). Most happily I was neither. Miss MARGARET PETERSON has built her novel, perhaps a trifle hastily, about a quite uncommon theme and given it, in Uganda, a quite uncommon setting. It is the story of a half-caste who marries a white girl in order to avenge, in her degradation, his sister whom the English girl's brother had betrayed. I must not say that _Tom Davis_, the half-caste, is too much a white man--for Miss PETERSON, to do her justice, has distributed goodness and badness among her blacks and whites with a quite impartial hand--but he is too fine a fellow to carry out his own plan, and, before he has done any lasting harm to the girl he has come to love, he takes himself, by way of a native rising, to a lotus-covered lake, and so out of her life. It seems a pity that the happiness of the story's end couldn't include _Tom_, but his ancestry effectually barred the way, and Miss PETERSON has had to rely upon a very strong and not quite silent Englishman of the best type for her satisfactory finish. * * * * *