_The Unspeakable Perk_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) and his attendant puppets are, to put it kindly, selected from the stock characters of Lesser American Fiction. There is the "radiant" heroine from Squeedunkville, Wis. (or Mass.); the tame Poppa with the simoleons, the hero heavily disguised as a worm, and a worm or so to do the real heavy worming when the hero's turn comes to pull off the grand-stand play (this doesn't sound like English but it is really the standard "line of talk" in Lesser American Fiction). And last but not least there is the "fiery" Southerner. In real life Southerners are melancholy men with a tendency to _embonpoint_ and clawhammer coats of ante-bellum design. But in Lesser American Fiction they are for some undiscovered reason always "fiery." To the fiery one the heroine "unconsciously turns" when the apparent earmarks of the hero's wormhood are dramatically revealed, and of course she hands him what she would probably describe as the "sister" stuff when the gentleman emerges in his natural colours. That is what makes the story-book Southerner so fiery. Place these complex characters in an imaginary Carribean Republic, a sort of transpontine Ruritania; add a revolution fostered by the serpentine diplomats of a European power; let the American eagle issue a few screams, and there you have the environment in which _The Unspeakable Perk_ lives and moves and has his unreal being. The keynote of SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS' story is what the _Perk_ person would describe as a want of "pep." Even the villains turn out to be comparative gentlemen in the end, the dirty work being conveniently fastened upon some "person or persons unknown." The yarn is well enough to wile away an hour; but in these days of burning realities fiction has lost its bite unless it too is informed with the spirit of reality. * * * * *