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"None of us is infallible—not. even the youngest," and the literary daemon of Miss Ashford's childhood was not always able to scale the pinnacle of achievement represented by "The Young Vi ters." In" these "remaining novels" the charm-of the ingenuous is sometimes quite as exquisite, but it is not sustained, as in the romantic adventures of Miss Ethe] Monticute. For that we must blame (one may hazard) the literary Self-consciousness that seems to have overtaken Miss Ashford about the age of twelve. The works which date from that period—"Where Love Lies Deepest" and "The Hangman's Daughter'—show that she had begun the deliberate cul. tivation of plot and pathos; she was fairly started on the road of professionalism. As she confesses in her Preface, "I put solid work into 'The Hangman's Daughter' and really tried to write well." The very decided interest which shows in the art of construction makes it indeed remarkable that the ambition it discloses should have expired with adolescence.
"The Hangman's Daughter" is not with out its delicie, as well as its sidelights upon a little girl's universe. Mr, Winston was ap—pointed hangman to "a small country town in Hants," and the remuneration was satisfactory, considering that "only about two people were bung a year." There are some sporting little places in Hampshire, but we don't know that any of them rises to an execution every six months, The child mind demands incident, and under. stands that it is chiefly produced by the clash between "good"? and "bad—so that to make the world tolerably interesting there must reeds be enough people of the latter sort to give a local executioner at least casual employment. Childhood is from a very early stage conscious of the monotony of perfection. It was possibly even a_smaller girl than the writer of "The Hangman's Daughter" who hoped that in another and a better world she could sometimes "go out end play with the little devils." Civilization may get rid of the hangman, but human nature will abhor the vacuum that he Jeaves.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.