Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-34.djvu/215

1884.] a pleasant book about the Chesapeake, the James River, and Delaware Bay, but has not made it so minute and particular in its descriptions as the reader (who does not exactly wish his ignorance to be taken for granted, but yet likes a fair chance to enlighten it if he need) would like. A yachtman may gossip endlessly, too, concerning himself and his yacht; for it is not a yachtman in general that one desires to read about, but a yachtman in particular. "Feed me with facts; I dote on facts," the modern reader cries, like one of Arthur Helps's Friends in Council. And on a yacht no experience is too insignificant to be slurred over. The really interesting things are actually about how people live, how they sleep, what they eat and drink, and what everything costs; and a naturalist in particular ought to be well aware of this. What is science, after all, but a record of the infinite details of all phenomena systematically arranged? Yet Professor Rothrock remarks on one occasion, "I do not know where the mercury would have stood, because I never carry a thermometer when on a Southern cruise in summer, for it is simply exasperating to know just how much heat one is enduring." Now, clearly, a scientific man, above all others, should carry along a thermometer, and experiment upon his own sensations for the comfort of stay-at-homes. Chesapeake Bay has, of course, the best reputation for all sorts of game and fish, and of the latter our author enumerates pike, yellow-reds, perch, and catfish as being the easy prey of the line or net. In Delaware Bay he encounters, as a naturalist should, a fish never seen in those waters before; and wherever he explores the coast he gives interesting facts in connection with the flora of the region. His clear, concise directions to yachtmen are worthy of all praise, and the whole volume is readable and enjoyable. His cruise in the lower Chesapeake and up the James River brings up many an association of the war, as names hardly heard by Northern ears for twenty years are enumerated as he passes by. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole book is the analysis given of an oyster and its little world of sensations and experiences, its friends and foes, for with the latter it is so beleaguered that, after careful calculations, it is affirmed that out of a million eggs laid only one oyster attains maturity and finds itself carried to market. This suggestion, taken in connection with the fact that, after all the perils the bivalve passes through, the profit at first hand of the Delaware-Bay crop each year is about two million four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, opens a wide vista to the imagination concerning the capabilities of the parent mollusk.

is something epic in Miss Maud Howe's new book, and its breadth of conception allows its jumble of incidents and accidents, its faults and follies of taste and style, all to meet and blend with a certain largeness of result which might indicate its being the typical work of a typical American girl. The author has gone far from the scenes of her first book to draw her inspiration for the second, and, as the typical American writer should do, has made use of the exceptional opportunities the country offers for immense contrasts. She has chosen California for a background, and against this, with its crude color and brilliant and startling diversities of effects, has projected the figure of her heroine, Millicent Almsford, who is, we may say, a real heroine. After travelling "from the coast of the Adriatic Sea to the shores of the Pacific Ocean with no companion save her maid and her own painful thoughts," she introduces all the subtilties and refinements, besides the agnosticism, of a high civilization, into the simple, bountiful life of San Rosario Ranch, adopting only in return what pleases her by its picturesqueness, local color, and stimulating effect upon her own consciousness. Still, she is "homesick for Italy,—for Venice,"—until the influence comes which makes her new home an idyllic heaven and earth. Graham, the hero of the book, is a painter,