The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-01-21
ncW Book neWS

The Race of the Swift. By Edwin Garlic Litsey. The seven stories com prfsing this book are seven tragedies The struggle for existence. ending in death can be nothing but tragedy. With the word creatures .The strong Fdestroy the weak. much as the hu- man folks do in another way" The fight for sustenance is grevious everywhere in the city's streets. in the depths of the forest. in open fields or mountain gorge. Seven tragedies, but how beautiful the stage setting. None of the nature books. to my thinking, come so close to the heart of the woods as this. There is no mood of atmosphere. no phase of seasons change, no tint of natures breath. no limit of frosts keeness. no odor Of warm earths distiI1ing, no gleam of star. no glint of nature that the writer has let escape his keen dis- cernment
 Nothing escapes the perceptenty of his observation. With such energy and vigor speed the descriptions that we see what he sees, feel the very airs of which he is sentient, catch the wait of the odors that meet his wanderings in the woodland.
 The opening paragraph arrests atten- tion, 1t Is held firmer till the last page. "A halved moon was shedding faint FLOW over lHG rugged DaCk country The night was young. Scarcely had the salmon tints which the sun had left in the West disappeared. Through the pure lambert air the rolling tones of the farmer could be heard as he called his pigs home. Through the high hills gleamed the timid tapers of the stars. low breeze was chanting a gentle, vesper among the pines and oaks up- on the back side. A whipporwills aF.,n n z1,.k further down the hollow. Nature was saying that the day was gone" Kentucky or Tennessee? And that cold green uplift of the night air in lands where no malaria weighs or clogs the wings of the wind.
 The mother fox wins the Race of the Swift" her strenuous tests the feeding of six young and the paying pack ever and anon on her track.
 In this story only we fail to be "in at the death" of some prowler of the wood himself preyed upon by larger foe.
 "Robber Baron" hawk was to meet his doom just below the dead snag of his home tree that was to him "turret of his castle, watchtower. bed, ban quet hall" brought low by his one dread enemy, the horned owl.
 Was ever the first sharpness of au- tumn better featured on a page than this:
 'The afr was crisp with the tong of wild leaves which the frost had bitten, and hazy with the Indian summer glory of the season. Back in the for est behind some naples were blazing in their cineem garments. and the harder leaves of the oak and chestnut were tingling. A creeper, encircling with many a close embrace the trunk of his own high tree, burned like the fiery serpent of same magician.-the Bob Whites sent their inexpressibly notes from different points like the sound of answering bells"
 The Hawk respected the buzzard. though he ate of carrion and rested on the ground in hollow trees. Earn hawk secured the earth. and never touched 1t but to rise again immedi- ately." And here the author makes an astonishing statement of the buzzard that he was never known to utter a sound from the beginning of time." For myself never heard a sound from a buzzard. but the negroes, those close observers of all living things. give to the buzzard voice, a oroak which they translate into, jargon.
 The marvellously beautiful descrip- tions of the rush of the storm, of the terror of the drouth. of the coming of night thread the lines as jewels of Divine depths of color and richness sparkles on a chain of gold. They cry out for quotation: '"The forest lay black in the close embrace of the odor- ous young night. Soft balsamic waves of air rose strata above strata, stealing between roughly corrugated trees and smooth timbers, and the satin-soft stems of the young sapfings, who had yet to run their sprees as knights of the wood against the mighty winds; permeating every dell and dingle, every copse and tanglet covert The nostrils which these air-waves touched tingled with delight, and the lungs which were heated and invigorated by this life giving essence from natures Iabora- tory expanded with conscious strength, and sent the red blood bound ing on it's ceaseless round.''
 The writer is responsive not only to every tint and tone that nature gives out, but is impressionable to the very spirit that transfuses her:
 'It was the still hour of the night. The hour when life ebbs lowest in the hearts of those who sleep; the hour just