"Tue House tuar Diep." By Henry Bordeaux. Translated by Harold Harper. (Fisher Unwin. 7s, 6d.)
A beautiful translation, this, of a delicate piece of-work, blown through by mountain winds. We know nothing of M. Bordeaux, beyond hig standing as French academician; but his fiction is evidently of the kind that may well creep quietly into the ranks of minor classics, while probably never attaining, outside his own land, any sensational success. The present book ly a sort of modern peasant version of "Hamlet," played in the chamois-hiding mountains of Savoy. - Its characters have a life and humanity that charm you as you read. The tragedy that drives first one and then another of the little patriarchal group from the thouse that' died" of desertion, and the slow horror that led to desertion, ig carried inevitably through the story with the touch of a true artist. The chamois-hunting bits are all too lifelike. There is something heart-rending in the picture of the dauntless little mother beast standing in front of her young. till she falls, shattered with bullets; fortunately the author. shares this feeling, and does not drive away our sympathy. It is a book that writer and translator may be proud of, and for which this country may be grateful.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.