Marsena (and other stories of wartime)

Those who have read Mr. Harold Frederic's novels and short stories will need no commendation of this book. The tale of the progress of Marsena Pulford, a young man with an artistic temperament in embryo (and absolutely, as his office boy would have said, " without no show"), is told with acuteness through the times when Marsena was a village photographer, having failed as a painter, and through the period of his service in the war, straight on to the hopeless tragedy at the last. It scarcely seems possible that any young woman could be both a hospital nurse and such a wicked fool as Miss Julia Parmalee is represented to be; but as the red-nosed man once said to Mr. Peter Magnus : " Rum creeters is women." There are three other stories in the book - all "of the wartime," and all well told.