Eike Mouldom. By Orme Agnus. Illustrated by Bertha New- combe
and others. (Ward, Lock, and Co. 6s )—" Zike Monldom " is the title story of a volume of capital tales of life among navvies.
"Orme Agana" paints his rough characters with a robust and vigorous brush. He makes no attempt to tone down their brutality, or to translate their oaths into delicate language. But he has found heroes among them and some very soft hearts, and he has caught the humour as well as the pathos and the hard- ness of their lives. His men are "great big children with great big hearts, a thirst that ever demands beer, and masters of a vocabu- lary enriched with the profanity of nearly every language spoken by the sons of men." But they are excellently human for all that. The funeral in "Ware, Mates," with the commentary of Father Gorman, and the stern tragedy of the Puritan father who prac- tically instigates his ne'er.do-weel son to commit suicide, and is , satisfied to the end that he has done the will of God,—strike the finest notes in the book. But all the stories are good in their way, and we confess to a particular pleasure in the tale of "The Proper Way," wherein a rustic maiden, having read about the ways of aristocratic lovers in a Lily Novelette, vainly essays to teach her swain to woo her as the gentlemen of fiction woo the ladies of the same. Miss Widge very nearly loses her sweet- heart altogether. But common-sense triumphs, and the letter in which William James Thomas Yeatman declares "that the stuff they do put in they papers be rubbish, and nobody did ever talk that way, which I believe to be a fact," is admirable, and much to be commended to the writers, as well as the readers, of the fiction of high life below stairs.
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