Miss MACNAUGHTAN always writes very charmingly and with plenty of humour, and in dedicating _A Green Englishman_ (SMITH, ELDER) to "My Canadian friends" she must, I think, be too unconscious of her powers, for this collection of stories is far from being a valuable endorsement of the flowery praises of the emigration bureaux. Very little hope is held out to the young man of good family who is a gentleman and something of a sportsman, and proposes to pick up gold on the pavements or the prairies of the West. I do not mean that the writer is ungenerous either to the Dominion or to its people, but she takes no pains to conceal the terror that lives with the beauty of its vast spaces, and she does not represent the struggle to "make good" as altogether a lovely thing. Perhaps the most ambitious of these sketches, certainly the one which conforms most nearly to the "short story" model, describes the fate of a clergyman's daughter who pays a visit to Macredie, "somewhere on the C. P. R. line," and marries a farmer and land-speculator, chiefly because this is her last chance of marrying at all. The horror of the silence and the snow, when her husband leaves her to face a Canadian winter alone, because he has business in England, eventually drives her mad; and though most of the stories are in a lighter vein than this, and there is plenty of the humorous sentiment in which Miss MACNAUGHTAN excels, the moral that I draw from the book as a whole is, "Visit Canada by all means, but, unless you are a Scotchman of the very doggedest type, don't stay there." * * * The hiding of lights under bushels may be all very wellin private life, but is misplaced in the book-publishing business. I thoroughly disapprove of the title and the outside cover of the Hon. Mrs. DOWDELL'S latest collection of leisurely essays, _Joking Apart_ (DUCKWORTH). The one suggests a heart-to-heart talk on the things that matter or else an outburst of boisterous farce, while the other is merely dismal. The two together are enough to put the public off a really good thing. Mrs. DOWDELL treats of the domestic and social side of feminine life in that peculiar vein of humour which is neither joking nor yet joking apart; her writing reminds me of those least-to-be-forgotten evenings of my life when I have been lucky enough to listen for hours to a real pucker conversationalist in the best of spirits and at the top of his form. The words that passed are forgotten; it is even difficult to remember what all the talk was about; but the recollection remains of having heard the truth of things for once, neither laughed at nor wept over, but very brightly revealed. Of twenty excellent chapters I much prefer the one about woman's sphere in electioneering; as to the thumb-nail illustrations in the margin, they show bad draughtsmanship, but some are delightfully apt. * * *