Los Cerritos : a Romance of the Modern Time. By
Gertrude Franklin Atherton. (W. Heinemann.)—" Fame," cries Miss Atherton's hero, in a fine passion of scorn, "that rescues a Jane Austen and passes an Emily Brontë by !" Yet a course of Pride and Prejudice" would not be bad for Miss Atherton, who puts on plenty of brilliant colours, but mixes and blurs them not a little. The heroine, Carmelita, is a child of Nature ; so is her hero, Alexander Tremaine,—that is, as far as his education as a Yankee millionaire will permit. Carmelita, in what we may call the Virginia stage of her career, takes as her lover a giant redwood- tree. A female friend is a little surprised that this should satisfy her ; and when Tremaine, a capitalist who has bought an estate over the heads of the squatters who occupy the land, appears on the scene, the tree is deposed. She develops rapidly. On the last page but one, she gives " a loud ecstatic cry like the lioness who has found her mate." She would have done the same eighty pages before, we are told ; but then there was a Mrs. Tremaine in existence, and the novelist, who evidently thinks that marriage is a fact, whether it be a failure or not, prudently makes her walk on in advance of her lover, and so fail to see his extended arms. But the ruffian of the story fires a shot ; it startles a herd of cattle ; Mrs. Tremaine is trampled to death ; and the lovers are free. We have said enough to show our readers what pleasure or profit they are likely to get from Los Cerritos.
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