BOOK NOTICE.

OLD FRIENDS AND NEW. Sarah O. Jewett. Boston: Houghton. Osgood, & Co. 1879.

This tasty little volume consists of seven short stories. They are not likely to keep one awake nights with excitement, but are, nevertheless, very entertaining, being (for the most part) quiet rural tales, written in an easy, "chatty" fashion, the pages of which contain many a charming glimpse of home-life. Indeed, the authoress possesses a remarkable faculty of sketching upon the page the pleasant characteristics of New England life, and the stories are the more interesting for the degree to which they appeal to one's own experience. In point of literary workmanship, the tales vary to some extent. The second is one of really weird pathos, and so placed as to gain in power by contrast. No. 4 is very ingeniously contrived and very amusing. The last is "A Bit of Shore-Life," and is refreshingly "salt." It consists of a series of rapid descriptions of shore-life, as vivid as one of Norton's "Marines" strung upon a simple thread of narrative.

We acknowledge the receipt of Mr. King's Hand-Book of Cincinnati.