St. Paul daily globe., 1895-09-22

and are by no means in society.
There is a CLINT of a yellowish fog
throughout the book, and the reader
realizes that he is in the city of
Thompson's poem, ''gray miles long,
and mirk miles broad" The char
acters are very average people who
speak a carefully studied Cockney
dialect, and Mr.. Pugh has tried to
do for their monotonous, pavement
bound lives what Barrie and Jam
MacLaren are doing for Scottish
folk. The task is a very difficult one
because ordinary people are SO much
more ordinary on pavements than
on turf, but it is admirably done.
All of the sketches are not equally
good-it is trick sketches have
but all possess humor, tenderness
and human sympathy, and the best
are very good indeed. If on the one
hand the sentiment of Mammals
Angel is diluted to sentimentality,
on the other, the pathos of Hiram
Sllke & Ga sketch whose ma
terdaI IS almost equally difficult to
handle-is real and penetrating. One
OF the best things in the book is the
little study Of "Mother-Sister Julia"
an account of a girl who forgets
that during the years she is strug-
glng TO bring up her orphaned
brothers and sisters, she herself is
growing old. When her task is ac-
complished and she is left alone
she "harks back to the calIow
thoughts of her adolescence and
falls a victim to the novelette, habit.
One notes with interest that they
are conservative in Suburbia. 1t is
on the occasion of the ''mother-sis-
ter's' marriage that the cynic of the
book proposes the inclusive toast:
Gentlemen: Our Women. May
they never grow old-or New"
ca Street in Suburbia." By Edwin w.
Pugh: New York: D. Appleton &
co. 81. For sale by the st. Paul
BOOK and Stationery company
Perhaps the kindest thing that can
be said Of "An Imaginative Man" is
that it is by the author of "a Green
Carnation." Whether this is a COM
pliment or not depends, of course.
on what you think of the latter
book-that curious mosaic of cpl
grams and ineptitudes which a
bright woman once described as
scraps from the waste-b basket of a
clever man, put together by stupid
one" AT all events it's perusal
aroused desire to know what Rob-
ert Hfchens could do, should he show
any intention of taking fiction seri-
ously. 1t is to be hoped that 'An
Imaginative Man" does not furnish
an exhaustive answer to this query.
The book is the study of the mind
of a man to whom only the incom-
prehensible was attractive. mo open
book is worth reading" was his YER
dict. When his wife, to whom he
had been drawn by a. certain vague
ness of character which defied his
analysis, is so ill-adviSed as to wish
to be comprehended by him and, as
a step to that end, confides to him the
substance of her prayers, his already
languid interest in her fails utterly.
They go to Egypt for the winter,
and Denison finds in the Sphinx a
mystery and an allurement which hu-
man nature has failed to furnish.
Here is the riddle he can not guess,
for which he has been searching all
his days. One wonders, parenthet-
ically, if Sherlock Holmes could have
made anything Of the Sphinx. At all
events Denison cannot, and he falls
to worshiping this mystery of the
ages with impossible ardor. The vast
quiet of Egypt lays hold of his too
irritable imagination; the monotony
of the desert seems "own brother to
eternity" and the prime lesson of
the Sphinx is that silence includes
all things and is better that all.
His cult, comes to include a mania
for silence, and the notion of a
wordless world of men and women
going about their work with in
articulate dignity, takes on for him
the beauty of an ideal in whose pres
ence speech at last comes to seem
a crime Naturally at this point he
can no longer lay claim to sanity,
and vle story is swiftly concluded
Once or twice in the history Of lit