A KANSAS NOVEL.* If this novel offered no other reason
for lenient treatment, the author's pathetic preface would be enough to secure indulgent consideration. He is, as he tells us, the editor and publisher of a small evening newspaper (presumably published at Atchison, Kansas). The book was written entirely at night, after he had done a hard day's work, "and in almost every chapter are recollections of the midnight bell." No one, he confesses, can possibly find more fault with his work than he has found with it himself ; a hundred times he has been on the point of burning the manuscript ; and these considerations he offers as a general apology for the book's many defects, and hopes that it will meet with the charity it deserves. We hope so too ; but while charitable the critic should be truthful, and the truth constrains us to say that a good deal of the book which Mr. Horne gives so diffidently to the world is dull. It does not, as a work of fiction should, seize the reader's attention at the outset, and sustain his interest to the end. Incidents which have no connection with the story are introduced far too freely, the dialogue is often pointless, and some of the speeches are much too long. But these few blemishes are more than redeemed by many excellences ; and though The Story of a Country Town may have few attractions for the ordinary devourer of novels, it rises far above the general level of contemporary fiction, and portrays phases of life with which few Englishmen—and probably not many Americans—we familiar. Mr. Horne seems to have written a realistic, novel— realistic in its best, not in its worst sense—without knowing it, and we have several times doubted whether it is the fiction it purports to be, or fact very slightly disguised. The story is told in the first person, and the scene laid in a prairie district in Kansas, where the hero's father, the Rev. John Westlock, and the wanderers who followed him, " had gone to grow-up with the country." In theory, nothing can be more romantic than life on the prairie—a boundless plain, gay with wild flowers and covered with waving grass, herds of buffaloes browsing in the far distance, troops of Indians flitting across the horizon, and hardy settlers full of energy and hope, making themselves a new and better home on the banks of some limpid and meandering stream, destined at no distant day to be the seat of a numerous and thriving community. The reality, as described in this book, is the very reverse of romantic. We have said that portions of the story are dull. So, for the most part, is the life which it depicts. Nothing• could well be slower and more colour less, more stale, flat, and unprofitable, than existence at Fairview, where the Westlocks first settled. Twin Mounds, whither they afterwards went, was not much better. Compared with it, the most bucolic of English villages is in a continual whirl of excite ment. And for a long time the settlers had not even the consolation which arises from a sense of growing prosperity. They were as badly-off as the British farmer of the period :— " There were cheap lands further on," writes Abram (generally shortened to "Ned") Westlock, the supposed narrator of the story,. "where the people raised a crop one year, and were supported by charity the next ; where towns sprang up on credit, and farms were opened with borrowed money ; where the people were apparently content, for our locality did not seem to be far enough West nor far enough North to suit them ; where no sooner was one stranger's money exhaneted than another arrived to tako his place ; where men mortgaged their possessions at full value, and thought themselves rich notwithstanding, so great was their faith in the country ; where he who was deepest in debt was the leading citizen, and where bankruptcy caught them all at last. On these lands the dusty travellers settled, where there were churches, school. houses, and bridges—but little rain—and railroads to carry out the crops, should any be raised ; and when any ono stopped in our neighbourhood, he was too poor and tired to follow the others. I became early impressed with the fact that our people seemed to be miserable and discontented, and frequently wondered that they did not load their effects on waggons again, and move away from a place which made
all the men surly and rough, and the women pale and fretful On the highest and bleakest point in the county, where the winds were plenty in winter because they were not needed, and scarce in summer for an opposite reason, the meeting-house was built id a corner of my father's field. There was a graveyard around it, and cornfields next to that, but not a tree or a shrub attempted its ornament ; and as the building stood on the main road, where the movers' waggons passed, I thought that, next to their ambition to get away from the country which had been left by those in Fairview, the movers were anxious to get away from Fairview Church, and avoid the possibility of being buried in its ugly shadow, for they always seemed to drive faster after passing it."
John Westlock, the minister and chief of the Fairview community, is a strong and original character of the austere
Puritanic type. Everybody saved, to his thinking, was as bad as nobody saved. The sacrifices he made for religion were tasks, his reward being a conviction that those who refused to make them would be punished. "He would rather have gone to heaven without the members of his family than with them, unless they had earned salvation as he had earned it, and travelled as steadily as himself the hard road on his map leading heavenward." He is a just man and an indomitable worker, preaching and ministering without reward, standing by his flock and rendering them needful help when he might have done much better for himself elsewhere ; but be is beloved by none save his own wife, whose affection is tempered, if not crashed, by the fear with which she regards him. But under all his sternness is a brooding spirit of discontent, which in the end works his rain. As time went on, the circumstances of the Fairview people somewhat improve, and one Sunday morning, at the close of his sermon, the Rev. John Westlock surprises his flock by telling them that he was going to preach for them no longer. He had done so hitherto because they had been too poor to pay a better man ; but, now that the Lord was prospering them, he cheerfally made way for a successor, who possessed not only religious enthusiasm, but great learning. The successor was the Rev. Gooch Shepherd, who had come out to the settlement in search of health. He had a beautiful daughter called Mateel, who afterwards becomes the wife of Jo Erring, and becomes also the cause of a terrible tragedy. Jo was Ned's uncle, although only a few years his senior. He lived with the Westlocks and wrought on the farm ; and the young men were boon companions and fast friends. Jo, albeit a fine, stalwart fellow enough, with a shrewd head and some book-learning, was terribly uncouth ; and when he called on the Gooch Shepherds, refined people from an eastern city, he considerably surprised them. He shuffled into their parlour wearing the Rev. John's boots and a pair of that gentleman's pantaloons tucked into their tops, and his cap on his head. Miss Mateel asked him to let her lay it aside for him. But Jo, thinking it would not be polite to trouble her, answered : " No, I thank you; I am very comfortable as I am." Then they invited him to sing, whereupon he gave them nine verses of the " Glorious Eighth of April" in a voice that made the windows rattle, and thought he had done very well ; but as Jo went home he began to fear that he had in some way committed an indiscretion, though what it was he could not for the life of him tell until he had consulted his friend, Damon Barker, who knew cities and had lived in good society. After this he took lessons from Barker in manners, and also learnt from him the trade of a corn-miller. Meanwhile, the Rev. John Westlock, on the plea that he had grown tired of Fairview, and that the people were now very well able to shift for themselves, sold his land and stock, and removed to Twin Mounds, the " country town " whose story the author tells, bought the copyright of a newspaper, and made his son lean the art of type-setting. In Twin Mounds people spent their idle time in religious discussions. They never discussed politics with spirit, and read but little save the Bible, to find points for dispute. " No two of them ever exactly agreed in their ideas, for men who thought alike on baptism violently quarrelled when the Resurrection was mentioned; and two of them who engaged a hell-redemptionist one night would in all probability fail to agree between themselves the next on the atonement."
Ned's father conducted. the paper well, and made it pay. He was the sort of man to make anything pay that he took in hand. But after they had been a few years at Twin Mounds he suddenly disappeared, leaving behind him a letter which was a greater shock to his family and friends than if they had seen him drop down dead before their eyes. " When this comes into your hands," he wrote to his son, "I shall be travelling the broad road I have so often warned others against; an outcast, and disgraced in the sight of God and man, for I am going away, and shall never come back." He ascribed his fall—and he had fallen to the lowest depth—to discontent, " inexplicable and monstrous, and horrible beyond expression." The companion of his flight was a certain Mrs. Tremaine, a connection of Damon Barker's. But the newspaper and all his other property, except a small sum of ready-money, he had made over absolutely to his son. John Westlock's single reappearance after his flight is powerfully described. His sorely-stricken wife refused to be comforted, and, faithful and loving to the last, she felt persuaded that, sooner or later, he would return to her. She would never go to bed, but sat up all night long with a light in her window, ready to welcome him back to the home he had deserted. And he did come back, but only on the morrow of her death. It was a dreary winter's night, the snow was falling thick and fast, the watchers were upstairs with the dead, and Ned sat alone in the room below, when he was startled by a timid rapping at the front door.
Opening it, he saw a strange man wrapped-up in mufflers and furs, and asked him to come in. He came in and sat down, and by the light of the fire Ned saw that the man was his father. His beard was grey, his face covered to protect it from the storm ; his shoes were wrapped in coarse bagging, and his hands rough and cracked as if he had been working as a labourer during his long absence. When he heard that his wife was dead, he asked permission to see the body, and his son led him into the deathchamber. "He got up from his chair with difficulty, and staggering after me, hesitated before entering the room ; but at last he followed me in timidly, and after looking at the face for a moment, fell on his knees before the coffin and sobbed aloud." His son, who, when he saw his father's grey head bowed in repentance over his mother's dead body, "forgave him from his heart" for the misery he had caused, and besought the broken man to remain. But he sternly refused ; nothing could move him from his resolve to go on his solitary way once more and bear in silence and alone the penalty of his sin.
" Listen to me a moment,' I slid, taking hold of him. Yon are poor and old ; I am young and have ready-money. If you will not remain here, as Heaven knows I desire you should, take it with you. I have no one to care for now, and you need it. I will ask it on my knees, if it will move yon. It is all yours, and I shall feel guilty all my life if you refuse this request, fearing you are poor and in
need of Rather than that,' he said, I would live again in this town, where every one is my enemy and accuser. No, I will take none of your money ; my needs are few and easily satisfied. But if you will grant me your forgiveness,'—there was more tenderness as he said it than I had ever beard before—' I will take that.'—I answered that he had suffered enough, and that I had already forgiven him ; that we all had, and that we had long been sure that he had repented of his one fault. 'There are but few of us who have to answer for but one fault,' I said. I know nothing to your discredit except this one mistake' He stood by this time near the door, with his hand on the latch, and simply saying good-bye, he opened it and went out into the storm."
And by his son or any who knew him John Westlock was never seen again. In the character and career of this man there is ample material for the making of an ordinary novel; in the •
love-story of Jo Erring there is ample material for the making of a powerful tragedy. Then we have. the narrator's own adventures, and Damon Barker's story ; and though every one
of these episodes is interesting in itself, the abundance of them detracts from the interest of the novel as a whole.
On the other hand, they are simply and naturally told ; the characters are highly original, racy of the soil, and evidently drawn from life. Mr. Horne, who, if he be not a native of Kansas, must have spent many years there, is a keen observer; and though he has not much notion of a plot, and his style leaves something to be desired, he has written a thoroughly American novel of a type never imagined by authors
who are reckoned. among the leading lights of American fiction, but who lay their scenes and seek their characters either in Europe or among the Europeanised population of the East. If Mr. Horne will study construction and give his mind to the contriving of a plot, all the incidents in which shall stand in close relationship to each other, and form parts of a wellordered plan, he may give us a novel quite as characteristic and far more entertaining than the one he has already written. But if he gives us nothing else, The Story of a Country Town will not easily be forgotten, and few of those who read it once will fail to read it again.
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