[Illustration: Timothy's Quest.]
In the arid life of the book-reviewer there is sometimes found the oasis of
opportunity to recommend to a (comparatively) less suffering community a
book worth reading. My Baronite has by chance come upon such an one in
_Timothy's Quest_, by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. The little volume is apparently
an importation, having been printed for the Riverside Press, Cambridge,
Mass. It is published in London by GAY AND BIRD, a firm whose name, though
it sounds lively, is as unfamiliar as the Author's. Probably from this
combination of circumstances, _Timothy's Quest_ has, as far as my
Baronite's quest goes, escaped the notice of the English Reviewer. That is
his personal loss. The book is an almost perfect idyl, full of humanity,
fragrant with the smell of flowers, and the manifold scent of meadows. It
tells how _Timothy_, waif and stray in the heart of a great city, escaped
from a baby-farm to whose tender cares he had been committed; how, in a
clothes-basket, mounted on four wooden wheels, cushioned with a dingy
shawl, he wheeled off another waif and stray, a prattling infant; and how,
accompanied by a mongrel dog named _Rags_, the party made its way to a
distant village, nestling in the lap of green hills with a real river
running through it. Here boy and baby--and _Rags_ too--find New England
friends, whom it is a privilege for _nous autres_ to know. _Samanthy Ann_
is a real live person, and so is _Jabe Slocum_--a long, loose,
knock-kneed, slack-twisted person, of whom Aunt _Hitty Tarbox_ (whom GEORGE
ELIOT might have sketched) remarked he would have been "longer yit if he
hedn't hed so much turned up fur feet." _Timothy's Quest_ is the best thing
of the kind that has reached us from America since _Little Lord Fauntleroy_
crossed the Atlantic.
(_Signed_) "_Nihil obstat_," BARON DE B.-W.
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