Life — December 7, 1916 — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

(s -CHRISTMAS LIFE- a aces Bern a The Latest Books RANK J. WILSTACH has made the world a Christmas present of the result of some twenty-five years of labor in the shape of “A Dictionary of Similes” (Little, Brown, $2.50) gathered from the writings of some eighteen hundred authors and comprising something like fifteen thousand examples. Mr. Wilstach has been as industrious as a pack-rat, as keen eyed as a clipping bureau and as persistent as a cough in church. His work is as monumental as a mausoleum, and should prove as handy as an orphan asylum. Anyone whose imagination is celibate and whose observation of life is without offspring can go to it and adopt a kidnapped child. URING the greater part of the nineteenth century there was a family in Innsbruch in the Tyrol that possessed and handed down from one generation to another the secret of a curious art—the painting of miniatures on cobweb. They bred the spiders in the grounds behind their home. They placed web on web till they secured the translucent textile they required. And then, with the delicate pigments and deft technique that made part of the family secret, they set illusive yet hauntingly lifelike faces to peering at you from the in- tangible support of these elfin canvase: Miss Ethel Sidg- wick's fiction—" Succession,” “ Herself,” “A Lady of Leisure” and now “Hatchways” (Small, Maynard, $1.40)—has much in common with this family’s trick of catching with a cobweb the semblance of life and the essence of personality “HAT aes "is the story of a keen young Frenchman's visit to England; of his introduction to a countryside coterie made up of two English families and their immediate intimates ; of his unentangled yet conducive share in the work- ing out of the sub-surface dramas of their personal problems and temperamental crises; and of the part played in it all by the continually operative, yet difficult to materialize, impinge- ment of personality on personality, Demanders of downright descriptions and analyzed explanations will lose their way in BON BON 5 CHOCO. iL ATE this deft supplying of the actual essentials of human inter course. But nowhere more than among the readers of Lire should delighted appreciators of Miss Sidgwick’s “a word to FRENCH BONBONNIERES || emi" metieci Sei fond | OVERS of downright description enlivened by the pscudo- subtleties of adventurous romance will find Stewart Ed- ward White's story of a race across central Africa between an English explorer and a German agent, each bent on enlist- ing a native king on his country’s side in the present war— “The Leopard Woman” (Doubleday, Page, $1.35!—a vivid and, at least on its adventurous side, a stirring tale. Nowhere have the African veldt and the exigencies of travel in that particular wilderness been more realizably portrayed. But the 5 ‘ “leopard woman's” intrusion into the man’s world of the Novelties, Favors, Toys | adventure will only justify itself to those readers to whom Christmas Tree Ornaments an unconventionally clad lady is her own excuse. AILLARD announces a most unusual and attractive Holiday display of exclusive importations. French Bonbonniecres HATS THE MATTER WITH MEXICO?” (Macmillan, 50 cents) is one of the small volumes called Our National Problem Serics—the series that was begun wil Owen Wister’s well-known “ Pentecost of Calamity.” It is Fifth 3 Vucsreres by Caspar Whitney, and contains some interesting comment on Mexican history, Mexican race-mixtures and the hopeless Ty. Tip C . hodge-podge of present conditions in the country. Also a atl Mhirly Fifth Sveect bitter arraignment of President Wilson's handling of the situa- tion as it has developed during his term. But though Doctor NEW YORK Whitney may be a good diagnostician, his suggested remedies sound like faith-cure. RGE MOORE'S prefaces, when he writes them (vide his preface to the American edition of his “ Memoirs of My Dead Life”), are quite as characteristically interesting as they are temperamentally different from those of his more preface-writing compatriot, Shaw. He has recently written a preface to “The Brook Kerith,” and a new edison of the novel has been issued to include it (Macmillan, $1.50). It should go far in inducing in intending readers the open-minded mood of human sympathy and self-searching that will prove the open sesame to the book's beauty and garnered wisdom. J. B. Kerfoot. comicbooks.com = = — — — — — — — — =| — — — = — —" — — — — = — — — — — — — — — — = —| — — —| =| =< — —| =| =| — = — —| — — = — = —| =| —| —| = = — — —| —| —| — — —| =| —| —| =| =| —|