BOOK NOTICE.

THE author of the volume before us* has sheathed her sword in myrtle boughs, and presented to us the cause of co-education, hidden among as many hair-breadth 'scapes and stirring incidents as you will find in the last sensation novel, and adorned by the usual quotations from "The Princess." We sincerely hope that the heroine (cui nomen Wilhelmina, appropriately shortened to "Will") had no fewer adventures in her after life than in her college course; for she must have contracted a morbid desire for excitement during those four years. She saves a classmate (male, of course) from drowning, rides a wild horse, is almost killed, like Horace, by the falling branch of a tree, and generally had her nerves strung to so high a pitch of excitement that if a reaction took place after graduation, the consequences must have been dreadful indeed. Likewise did she have her share of other wooing than that of the Muses, and did not take an entirely passive part in the amusement, as is sufficiently shown by the following invitation to a shooting expedition, in which, by the way, she shot several squirrels "on the fly," and performed other remarkable feats of sportsmanship: -

MONSIEUR RANDOLF: Est-ce-que j'aurai le tresgrand plaisir de vous accompagner Samedi prochain d'aller faire tour a la campagne pour tuer des oiseaux?

La votre, WILHELMINE ELLIOTT.Miss Elliott seems to have devoted more time to the higher branches than to French, and would probably have done better to write her "invitation a la chasse" in Latin or Greek. In these languages, and in the other studies of "Ortonville University," she succeeded so well that she obtained a Commencement Part; and we need hardly mention that her subject was, "Woman in the Professions." We leave her on the point of entering a Medical School, hampered by an erst unfaithful, but now repentant lover, whom she has accepted on probation.

Of course it is only the less important features of the book that we have criticised. We doubt whether it will accomplish its apparent object of convincing unbelievers in co-education, who, by the by, must not be undeservedly confounded with unbelievers in equal education; but it will certainly furnish pleasant and light reading to anybody who takes it up; and we are happy to state that the author's English is far better than her French.

E. C. P.

* An American Girl, and her Four Years in a Boys' College. By SOLA. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1878.