Jasper's Sweet briar. By Catherine E. Mallandaine. (S.P.C.S.) —The essential
features of this story—a warm-hearted girl marrying a man beneath her, not so much in station as in edues-
tion, estrangement, the disciplining of natures, and reconcilia- tion—are tolerably familiar. But Miss Mallandabae contrives to give a good East Coast environment to, and to throw genuine human nature into, her story of the love, the marriage, and the alienation of Lucy Cowern and Jasper North the fisherman. The secondary personages in the drama—especially Mr. Cowern, Lucy's purse-proud but not utterly bad or altogether selfish father, rude old Mrs. North, and, above all, the morally angular Meg, whose tongue does all the mischief —are exceptionally well drawn. Everything becomes in the end perhaps too absolutely and too suddenly paradisaical, and the authoress of the story wears its moral rather too ostentatiously on her sleeve. But the moral is in itself good, and the story in which it is " conveyed " flows very pleasantly.
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