Page:Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 4.djvu/240



Nobody expects from Miss Alcott any thing but books of the raciest qualities and the choicest flavors. This story of her foreign travel, in company with two female friends, is just as vivacious and unique as any thing previously issued with her name on the title-page. One may have read the narratives and notes of forty tourists over the same field, but he cannot afford to neglect this story. He will find nothing repeated either in substance or form. It is a new vein that is here worked, and the products are all singularly fresh. It is a rare literary bundle which these shawl-straps enclose.

Roberts Brothers have published a small volume the mere announcement of which is enough to insure its circulation. This volume is "Shawl-Straps," a second part of "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag," by Louisa M. Alcott, — a name well known to all "little men," and "little women," and "old-fashioned girls," now inhabiting the country. The book is a racy, almost rollicking account of the personal experiences of three American women travelling in France, Switzerland, Italy, and England.

Miss Alcott carefully abstains from writing what is called a book of travels, and confines herself to giving an amusing account of what really occurred to herself and her two companions. Thus, in London, the party devoted much more time in hunting up Dickens's characters than in visiting "leading objects of interest." They nearly succeeded in finding Mrs. Gamp, and actually took "weal pie and porter" at Mrs. Todger's. The description of Spurgeon and his congregation is the most life-like we have ever read. Indeed the whole tone of the book is that of conversation, in which the familiarity of ordinary talk is accompanied with more than ordinary certainty of phrase, so that her readers may, in some sense, be said to join the party and become "Shawl-Strappists" themselves. It may be added that one is never tired of any record of a foreign tour which makes him or her a companion of the journey; and, as Miss Alcott succeeds in doing this, the principal objection which will be made to her book is its shortness.