SIX MONTHS AT MRS. PRIOR'S. By Emily Adams. Illustrated. Boston: D.
Lothrop & Co. $1.25.
"In this fresh little story, which is addressed especially to young
girls, the author tries to impress the lesson that the disagreeable and
annoying duties of life may be made pleasant by accepting them as
inevitable, and asking help from above. Mrs. Prior is the widow of a
clergyman, and has been left with five little ones to support. She
discharges her servant, and divides the lighter duties of the household
between herself and the two eldest of her children, Minnie and Helen.
Unaccustomed to any thing but study and play, the girls find it very
hard to have their old time appointments for enjoyment circumscribed,
and complain bitterly at first. The book gives a history of their
experience, and shows how the work that was so irksome at first became
in the end a source of pleasure and means of healthful discipline.
"Six Months at Mrs. Prior's" is a sweet story of womanly tact combined
with Christian trust. A widow, with scanty means, makes a home happy for
a group of children, restless, wayward and aspiring, like many American
children of our day. The mother's love holds them, her thrift cares for
them, her firmness restrains, and her christian words and life win them
to noble aims and living. The influence of the christian household is
widely felt, and the quiet transforming leaven works in many homes. We
can't have too many books of this kind in the family or Sunday-school."
MISS PRICILLA HUNTER, by Pansy, opens a new view for that charming
writer, but one eminently popular at the present time. It deals with the
payment of a church debt, and shows how an humble woman, with a
Christian character which gave power to her words, raised the money to
pay off a debt which had long been a hindrance to church growth and to
Christian benevolence. Why she did it, and how she did it, is told in
Pansy's best fashion: her encounters with crabbed folks, and stingy
folks, and folks determined not to give to the church debt, are highly
amusing, as well as her devices to get something from everybody.
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