Two years later appeared a far more ambitious and maturer volume containing half-a-dozen sentimental studies and half-a-dozen tales of the French villages Crackanthorpe so loved and understood. His method of work becomes more pronounced here, that is to treat an English theme in the French manner, a task which demands more culture than the ruck of the conteurs for the English magazines attain with their facile tears and jackass laughters, their machine-like nonentities and pudibond ineptitudes. Crackanthorpe, indeed, has left no following behind him, and only once later can I recall a volume of short stories that suggests his manner: J. Y. F. Cooke’s tales of the nineties in his _Stories of Strange Women_. In this new volume as before, Crackanthorpe devotes himself to the expansion of the sentimental study, the problems of sexual relationships, which are not altogether pleasing to every one, and this may account for his limited appeal. In _Wreckage_ all the women were vile, but here he evidently intends to picture the other side of women in Ella, the wife of the poet Hillier, with its slow Flaubert unrolling of her infinite delusion. In _Battledore and Shuttlecock_, in Nita, of the old Empire promenade days, he again develops the good side. While in the study of the _Love-sick Curate_ we feel that Ethel is not hard-hearted, but only that the Rev. Burkett is an unutterable idiot. _Modern Melodrama_ is the short, sharp climacteric stab of Maupassant perhaps not over well done. The sentimental studies close with _Yew-Trees and Peacocks_, which seems rather to have lost its point in the telling. The tales of the Pyrennese villages where Crackanthorpe used to stay are typical productions of the delight of the men of the nineties in their sojourning on the sacred soil of France. _The White Maize_, _Etienne Matton_, and _Gaston Lalanne’s Child_ are perhaps not unworthy of the master himself in their simple directness, devoid of all unnecessary padding. With a few phrases, indeed, Crackanthorpe can lay his scene, strip his characters nude before us. How we realise, for instance, Ella lying in bed the night before her mistaken marriage with Hillier. She is there in all the virgin simplicity of the average English country girl: The window was wide open, and the muslin curtains swaying in the breeze bulged towards her weirdly. She could see the orchard trees bathed in blackness, and above a square of sky, blue-grey, quivering with stifled light, flecked with a disorder of stars that seemed ready to rain upon the earth. After a while, little by little, she distinguished the forms of the trees. Slowly, monstrous, and sleek, the yellow moon was rising. She was no longer thinking of herself! She had forgotten that to-morrow was her wedding-day: for a moment, quite impersonally, she watched the moonlight stealing through the trees.