Indian Fairy - Tales. By Mark Thornhill. (Hatchards.)—These fairy-tales, which Mr. Thornhill,
he tells us, "collected," are really charming. The volume contains five long and five short stories, and some dozen or so morsels, so to speak, of folk-lore, as Mr. Thornhill describes them. Here is a specimen, briefly told, of the last. Three wise men disputed as to their relative knowledge. As they talked, they came to the bones of a dead tiger. "I can join these bones," said one, and the tiger's skeleton was fitted together. The second uttered a spell, and the skeleton was clothed with flesh and skin. The third made it alive, whereupon "it rose up and devoured the three learned men," and people con- cluded, when they heard it, that "the most learned men are not always the wisest." "The Perfumer's Daughter," with its wild flight of fancy—the "Arabian Nights" contains nothing to com- pare with it—is perhaps the best of the longer stories. "The Magic Horse," too, is very good. These and the shorter stories bear, of course, a certain resemblance to those with which we are already familiar ; but they have a charm of their own.
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