Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/824

794. She renders the exciting, but usually profitless, race in the hot sun a delightful "scientific pursuit"—or, perhaps, a sort of new "field-sport"—whose young disciples are aptly called "butterfly hunters." Under the guise of juvenile adventures in the country, she describes in popular and intelligible terms the various butterflies found in our latitudes, in the order of their seasons, and awakens a lively interest in their capture and study. She avoids the repulsive features of dry scientific cataloguing, and, where the polysyllabic nomenclature of the books would be too much for her little students, gives a choice of some easier name—for example, "elm moth," in lieu of ceratomia quadricornis. Instead of the time-honored, but rude and often disappointing weapon of the torn and profusely-ventilated straw hat, she shows how to construct a gauzy net upon a barrel-hoop, with a light handle—fatal to the butterfly—and a box supplied with corks and long, slender pins, to secure the captured prey. And, in womanly care against cruelty, rather above the refined directions of "gentle Isaak Walton," who shows how to so tenderly barb an angle-worm that it may wriggle most enticingly, she provides the young butterfly hunter with a bottle of ether, a drop of which puts the insect into permanent sleep, before he is transfixed as a specimen. Armed with this apparatus, the eager hunter pursues his game with pleasure and profit; and many boys and girls, we fancy, will have cause to thank the author of this story for her kindly labor. The profuse, careful and accurate illustrations, drawn and engraved by Mr. Russell, from specimens in Mrs. Conant's collection, add to the book's attractiveness.

— gentleman who writes under the signature of "Barry Gray" has acquired a reputation, which he and his publishers have reason to prize, as a pleasant writer upon the joys and sorrows of every-day life. Of these he wisely prefers to bring the former to the minds of his readers; for unless we have a touch of the fiend in our composition we all love best to look on beauty, and on happiness, which is the beauty of life; and it is only by the greatest masters, or by those who have a peculiar gift therefor, that the tragic or even the pathetic can be so treated as to give pleasure to the people whom Barry Gray addresses. Tragedy is so often laughable, and pathos so often dull. The title of Mr. Gray's last book, "Cakes and Ale," is a very good one for its contents, which are pervaded with a tone of mild and decorous jollity. It gives us a sight of what goes on in the dining-room and the library at Woodbine, which appears to be a very charming place filled with charming people. We are made inmates of the family circle and free of the kitchen, in fact. The author binds his sketches together by a story which he writes, and in his own person reads to his wife and his pretty sister-in-law and her lover, and the children, who all have something to say about it, in a pleasant, good-humored, and sometimes slightly satirical way. And so the book bubbles and glances on till it comes to an end, we can hardly guess why; and most of its readers will wish that it was longer, which, to appropriate and slightly pervert a saying of Mr. Sam Weller's, is the true secret of book writing, when you write for the amusement of your readers. Mr. Gray's style is pleasant, but his English is not always pure or correct. He should avoid, among other lapses, writing, "I will have finished before Mr. What's-his-name calls;" for I shall have finished, etc.

—, in his little book entitled "The Turk and the Greek," appears most to advantage when he is describing the scenery of his travels. The following passage, in which he expresses the admiration and emotion with which he entered the Bay of Constantinople on a second visit, is very good of its kind:

The grandeur, the magnificence which had so often thrilled my heart in the days of youth, were still there. Time had not effaced the beauty that lingers over those ancient battlements and storied serais: the purple tints still suffused those winding shores; unfading green still clothed those cypress groves and