The Young Nile Voyagers. By Anne Bowman. (Routledge.)—Pic- tures of
giraffes, hytenas, camels, savages, the lion, and the hippopota- mus will make boys turn eagerly to the accompanying letterpress, and insist on grown-up people reading it aloud. No doubt the grown-up people will object, in the course of this reading, that the story is extra- vagant and impossible. Two young boys who wander up to London with 45/ sewn in their jackets, take a passage in a French ship to Malta, and are landed somewhere or other in Africa, are characters of a legen- dary stamp. Their farther adventures are not inconsistent with such a beginning. They are always being robbed and enslaved by Arabs, losing their way, dying of hunger and thirst, being attacked by wild beasts, and yet escaping from everything. We should rather like to have a sketch map of their travels, as we confess to being puzzled by Miss Bowman's geography. However, boys will be perfectly ready to listen to her account of "Africa and golden joys," and an affray with a rhinoceros will reconcile them to any amount of improbability.
Previous page
