As for _The Red Badge of Courage_, the test of the book is in the way it holds you. I only know that whenever I take it up I find myself reading it over and over, as I do Tolstoi’s _Cossacks_, and find it as hard to put down. None of Doyle’s or Weyman’s books bear re-reading, in the same way; you must wait till you have forgotten their plots. Even the slipshod grammar seems a part of the breathless life and action. How much promise it gives, it is hard to say. Goethe says that as soon as a man has done one good thing, the world conspires against him to keep him from doing another. Mr. Crane has done one good thing, not to say two; but the conspiracy of admiration may yet be too much for him. It is earnestly to be hoped, at least, that he may have the wisdom to stay in his own country and resist the temptation to test his newly-found English reputation by migrating—an experiment by which Bret Harte has been visibly dwarfed and Henry James hopelessly diluted. T. W. HIGGINSON. Cambridge, Mass. A PROLOGUE. A GLOOMY STAGE. SLENDER CURTAINS AT A WINDOW, CENTRE. BEFORE THE WINDOW, A TABLE, AND UPON THE TABLE, A LARGE BOOK, OPENED. A MOONBEAM, NO WIDER THAN A SWORD-BLADE, PIERCES THE CURTAINS AND FALLS UPON THE BOOK. A MOMENT OF SILENCE. FROM WITHOUT, THEN—AN ADJACENT ROOM IN INTENTION—COME SOUNDS OF CELEBRATION, OF RIOTOUS DRINKING AND LAUGHTER. FINALLY, A SWIFT QUARREL. THE DIN AND CRASH OF A FIGHT. A LITTLE STILLNESS. THEN A WOMAN’S SCREAM. “AH, MY SON, MY SON.” A MOMENT OF SILENCE. CURTAIN. STEPHEN CRANE. A HOT WEATHER IDYLL. The new assistant sat in the office, vainly endeavoring to discourage the perspiration in its efforts to show him how the water comes down at Lodore. But, with a perseverance worthy a wetter cause than the dry weather, it continued to flow from his mobile brow and neck, mop he never so well. The thermometer on the wall registered 89, and the calendar only May 1st. It was the new assistant’s first day in the office, and he had already begun to contemplate with humid horror the prospect of spending an entire summer in a place that was already warm enough to have caused his once stiff and glossy collar to emulate his puff-bosom shirt. “Why,” he gasped to the Old Book-keeper, “what _will_ it be when summer really comes?”