Tae Open Tree—By Anthony Carlyle.
Mills and Boon. 7s. 6d. net.
One must believe that there is a public that reads this kind of novel and pays to read it. It is still being written, as if the machinery that was set up sometime in the late Queen Victoria's time to turn it out had gone wrong, inthe active sense that nobody of the present generation knows how to switch off the motor. But unless it is done by a machine like those wonders in use in present-day newspaper offices, which do everything but read the paper for you—in one operation, that does not explain the fact that these novels still find publishers. And since they are published one comes back to the assumption that they must be read. It is very strange. They ars all of a pattern, like those clockwork cheap tin German toys which began to circulate at the same tims. But the characters of the novels are not quite lifelike as the toys. Thtre was always something humanly unexpected about the toys. One never could be sure what they would do.. They fell into the bath and churned up the water as they lay stupidly. bubbling for help at the bottom;
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.