Why then did the revelations of Lawson sound like a new trumpet and rouse the country so quickly and so universally? Because Lawson spoke from the _inside_: because Lawson was one of the kings of finance himself: because Lawson had played the game himself: because Lawson drew to himself that peculiar attention which attaches to the witness who “turns State’s evidence.” A robber who has worn the mask and ridden with the band on many a midnight marauding foray is always listened to with breathless interest when he enters the box and tells how the robbery was planned, how the crime was committed, and now the spoil was divided. This is but natural. No matter how much proof one may have to establish the guilt of the accused, one feels, always, that there are details which none but the criminal can supply. Here Thomas Lawson’s value is beyond dispute and beyond price. That the methods of Frenzied Finance are substantially what Lawson says they are, can no longer be a matter of doubt. “=When You Were a Boy.=” By Edwin L. Sabin. The Baker & Taylor Co., New York. It seemed impossible that another successful book on school-life and boyhood days could be written, but the author has shown how easily one may be mistaken about a thing of that sort. Here is no story of a fascinating but impossible “Little Lord Fauntleroy”; here is no coarse, witless, stupid “Stalky & Co.,” here is no “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer,” or “Tom Brown,” or “Peck’s Bad Boy,” or “Master William Mitten.” The hero of “When You Were a Boy”—is you. The author has looked into his own heart and drawn your picture to life. You had your little “fist and skull” fights—and here they are in this book. You had a pet dog who did all sorts of funny, aggravating, endearing things, and then died while you were off from home; and the author tells of it, intimately. Your first experience with your father’s shot-gun, your savage rapture over the first thing you killed—here it is in the book. And the first fishing trip, the first “party” you attended, the first girl you “saw home,” the first sweetheart—it is all put down, accurately, vividly. Even that time—you mean little whelp!—when you determined to punish your parents by “running away from home,”—the author found it out on you, and you will hang your head once more, and your eye will dim, as you read about it, in the book. The author does not preach and does not prose, and does not sentimentalise—but “When You Were a Boy” is one of the most life-like delineations of the American boy—his character, his feelings, his habits, his fun and frolic, his passions, his standards—that has ever been put in a book. =Bossism and Monopoly.= By Thomas Carl Spelling. D. Appleton & Co., New York.