The Head-Station. By Mrs. Campbell-Freed. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.)—In
this "novel of Australian life," Mrs. Campbell- Freed shows the characteristics with which readers of her fictions must be familiar. She shows them, indeed, in a marked way, for The Head-Station is, perhaps, more powerful than anything that has before come from her pen. We have brilliant and effective descrip- tions of life and scenery, and no one can fail to realise something of how men and women live and think, and of the aspects which nature wears, on the other side of the world, after reading these graphic pages. The author has in a remarkable degree the power of calling up in vivid presence the scenes and the persons that she describes. The cave in the hills at the end of the second volume is an instance of this power. All the dramatis personw too—and they are a numerous company—are lifelike ; tragic or comic, as the case may be, they are always human. A less agreeable characteristic is Mrs. Campbell-Praed's determination to heighten the interest of her novel with the struggle between duty and forbidden love. Surely it is not impossible to write an effective tale without introducing this element ? There are unhappy wives who find a terrible contradiction between the impulses of their hearts, and the bonds by which some folly of early days or a mistaken choice has bound them ; but their trouble is not so important an element in human life as some novelists would have us think. There are writers who seem positively unable to make a plot into which some form of this difficulty does not enter. Mrs. Campbell-Praed is far too clever to be one of them. She very much mistakes the taste of tbe general public of readers if she thinks that they cannot be satisfied without the introduction of this painful complication.
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