• MRS. EWING'S BOOKS FOR CHILDREN.* IN Mrs. Ewing, children
and all child-lovers have lost one who was to many of them as a personal friend—unknown, except through her books, yet possessing that magnetic attraction granted to some writers and withheld from others in some apparently inexplicable way. Readers of her stories, as they appeared year after year in Aunt Judy's Magazine, must rejoice that, through the medium of the shilling edition of her works, they have become more widely known and appreciated. In reading them, two things strike one forcibly. First, her vivid and intuitive sympathy with children, and their often little- understood dreams, troubles, and "pretendings ;" and secondly, the picturesqueness and beauty, sometimes rising to eloquence, of the terse, occasionally almost abrupt, style.
This insight into the child-mind is, perhaps, most noticeable in those stories which are told in the first person, either by the child as a child, or when grown up. Two short tales, called Our Field and Brothers of Pity, are fall of this vivid realisation of a child's thoughts and fancies. Our Field describes the delight which three children who discovered it for themselves, found in a field, where they enjoyed themselves un- molested, after having suffered much from disturbance in their play heretofore. No philosopher deep in some profound treatise could describe with more feeling his annoyance from interrup- tion
There was no kind of play we liked better than playing at houses and new homes. But no matter where we made our home,' it was sure to be disturbed. If it was indoors and we made a palace under the big table, as soon as ever we had got it nicely divided into rooms according to where the legs came, it was certain to be dinner-time, and people put their feet into it. The nicest house we ever had was in the outhouse ; we had it, and kept it a secret, for weeks. And then the new load of wood came and covered up everything, our best oyster-shell dinner-service and all. Any one can see that it is im- possible really to fancy anything when you are constantly inter- rupted. You can't have any fan out of a railway-train stopping at stations, when they take all your carriages to pieces because the chairs are wanted for tea ; any more than you can play properly at Grace Darling in a life-boat, when they say the old cradle is too good to be knocked about in that way. It was always the same. If we wanted to play at Thames Tunnel under the beds, we were not allowed ; and the day we did Aladdin in the store-closet, old Jane came and would put away the soap, just when Aladdin could not possibly have got the door of the cave open."
Again, in Brothers of Pity, the story of the only child, who thinks "it must be mach easier to play at things when there are more of you than when there is only one," and who makes playfellows for himself out of his studious godfather's old books, we have the same quick sympathy for childish imaginings.
Of the longer tales, Jan of the Windmill is the most effective, as well as the most powerfully written. In reading it one seems to see the great Wiltshire plain spread out before one, and to fall, like Jan, under the fascination of the wide sky.
world to be seen from the windmill home. Jan, the foster- child of the mill, who gradually reveals the artist-soul within him, and from drawing " pegs " works gradually up to the proud height of painting the village sign, and eventually becomes a great artist, is one of the most attractive of Mrs. Ewing's characters; but the villagers in the story,—Master Swift, the North-country schoolmaster ; Master Chrtter, the innkeeper; Daddy Angel, and the rest, are capitally drawn.
Six to Sixteen is a story mainly of and for girls, and none more wholesome and inspiriting could they have. The account of the North-country home, and the busy, intellectual family with their many "fads "—natural history, languages, sketching, brass-rubbing, enough to rouse any one to have some " fad " in good earnest on her own account. The closing words of the story are part of a letter from the married daughter As to social ups and downs, and not having much money or fine dresses, a collection' alone makes one almost too indifferent.
Do you remember the mother's saying long ago, that intellectual pleasures have this in common with the consolations of reli- gion, that they are such as the world can neither give nor take away ?"
• Jan of the Windmill, Six to Sixteen, Sc. By J. H. Ewing. London : Bell and Sons.—Brothers of Pity, and other Tales of Beasts and Men. By the same Author. London: Society for Promoting Christi= Knowledge.
For short compressed descriptive power take the following from Jan of the Windmill :—
"Abel opened the door and looked oat. A white moth, known as 'the miller,' went past him. The night was still—so utterly still that no sound of any sort whatever broke upon the ear. In dead silence and loneliness stood the mill. Even the miller-moth had gone; and a cat ran in by Abel's legs, as if the loneliness without were too much for her. The sky was grey."
There, in a few words, is the whole picture. The intense brooding stillness, eerie as if before coming storm or disaster, and the
lonely mill in the gathering dark with only the wide plains around.
In these days of countless children's books, good, bad, and indifferent, it is refreshing to find some which are written in good English, and where the style is not made necessarily childish. Children resent patronage and condescension as keenly as any of their elders ; and, perhaps, one secret of the charm of these stories is that the readers are not written " down " to, but are treated to the author's best. Another may be in the transitions from melancholy to mirth, which are as quick as in real life. Mrs. Ewing's humour is almost as great as her pathos, which is saying a great deal ; for we know of nothing much more pathetic in its way than "Jackanapes," the story of the soldier-lad whose father fell at Waterloo, and who died himself to save his friend from death. Such books as these cannot but be good for the children of the day ; for, without being " goody-goody " or too didactic, they teach a lesson which is as much needed nowadays as ever it was, that,—
" There be things—oh, sons of what has deserved the name of Great Britain, forget it not!—' the good of 'which and 'the use of' whioh are beyond all calculation of worldly goods and earthly uses : things such as Love, and Honour, and the Soul of Man, which cannot be bought with a price, and which do not die with death. And they who would fain live happily ever after, should not leave these things out of the lessons of their lives."
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