timent, free from the morbid or effusive, have learned to depend on her, and they will welcome with real personal gratitude the volume of her short stories called "The Wages of Honor" which Charles Scribner's Sons publish. The title story analyzes the personality and power of a hard-working, selfeffacing college president; "The Master Strategist" describes the ingenious intervention of an admiral's aunt in behalf of the happiness of his granddaughter; and in "Brewster Blood" a sturdy seven-year-old youngster becomes a delightful illustration of heredity. The central figure of the first story in the group called "Of the Mississippi Country" is a drainage engineer in hard luck; of another, a Swedish maid of all work; and of the third a woman who brings her husband's dredging contract to a successful conclusion in his absence. The book closes with a trio of stories of the Mexico of Villa and Carranza, full of life and action, and written with a sympathetic appreciation of the loyalty and devotion to be found in the Mexican of the humbler type.

Ex-Ambassador James W. Gerard's "My Four Years in Germany" (George H. Doran Co.) is by all odds the most important volume in the lengthening list of war books, and the book which of all that have been written is most sure of holding an enduring place in the history of the war. No other man had the same opportunity as Mr Gerard for watching intimately and closely all that went on in Berlin in the years immediately before the war and through the war up to the breaking of diplomatic relations with Germany and the Ambassador's departure from Berlin last February. He saw Berlin, and the Kaiser's court and advisers, and the military leaders, and the German people themselves, at close

range, and the disclosures which he makes of the plots and trickeries of which he was not only a witness, but in some instances the intended victim, are astounding the climax being reached in the attempt which was made to induce him, after relations had been severed, and while he was waiting for his passports, to sign an important treaty in the interest of Germany, and this under the threat, that, if he did not sign it, he would make it very difficult for Americans to leave the country. Among the thirty or more illustrations in the book none is more significant than the facsimile of the personal telegram sent by the Kaiser to President Wilson, the existence of which was for so long denied, and the picture of the medal exulting over the sinking of the Lusitania. This medal bore the date May 5, 1915, although the Lusitania was not sunk until the 7th-a fact which shows how deliberately that cruel tragedy was planned. Mr. Gerard's book is one which every intelligent American should read from beginning to end. Especially should he give heed to Mr. Gerard's solemn warning that the military and naval power of the German empire is unbroken; that Germany has now, after all her losses, about nine million effectives under arms; and that there is no prospect that Germany will break under starvation or make peace because of revolution. Mr. Gerard believes that we are not only justly in this war, but prudently; and that, "If we had stayed out and the war had been drawn or won by Germany we should have been attacked—and that while Europe stood grinning bynot directly at first, but through an attack on some Central or South American State to which it would be at least as difficult for us to send troops as for Germany."