Lorimer of the Northwest

an account of the trials and disappointments of an indomitable young Englishman, who has left home because he is ambitious, because he hates the drudgery of a Lancashire cotton mill, and because he has lost his heart to a young woman who seems hopelessly beyond his reach; and has emigrated to the great, free, unbroken region of the Canadian Northwest. There is a breath of strong, clean fresh air blowing through the early chapters of this book, a suggestion of wholesome, honest toil, and undaunted determination to wrest a victory from Nature, in spite of drought, and frost, and treacherous elements. But, intermingled with this straightforward chronicle of pioneer struggles, there is a misplaced and rather exasperating vein of melodrama—the sort of melodrama that properly belongs in Mr. Bindloss's other type of story and which is as much out of place in the present volume as a scarlet patch in a suit of grey clothes. Women, of course, we expect to find in the story; but the way in which two women in particular who had figured in his life in England continue unexpectedly to cross his trail in the mountainous wild of Canada, always turning up at the psychological moment to add new comp'ications to his difficulties, forms a tax upon our credulity which tends to discredit even that part of the story that is soberly and sincerely told.