Chapter 1

with her aunt, Mrs Tarleton, on the death of her father. Yet the latter figures strongly in the later stages of the book, so we conclude that Kingston wrote the book with parts being pulled in from previous notes, but that he did not go back and re-read the book with a critical eye.

However, those are but passing observations which it is necessary to make. The book is about the war between the British and the American Royalists on the one hand, and the American rebels on the other. The author is probably sympathetic to the rebels, but certainly to the cause of Freedom, and he makes his hero, Hurry, sympathetic to their cause, yet always observant of his duty as an officer of the King's Navy. While there are the usual fights between ship and ship, or between ship and weather, as always so beautifully expressed by Kingston's pen, we find that by chapter 9 Hurry has fallen in love with an American young lady, and the rest of the book contains episodes in which he is in contact with her, though she is the daughter of a Colonel active on the Rebel side. It won't spoil the story if we say that they marry in the last paragraph, five lines from the end.

Slightly annoying is the fact that we are made interested in the fate of Harry Sumner, a very young midshipman, alone in the world, who is wounded in a minor skirmish, and by Chapter 8 is met with in a sick-berth, fully expecting to die. But does he die, or was that but a childish fancy? We never find out.

This book is probably one of the very best historical novels about the American Rebellion, seen from the naval point of view, and as such is well worth reading by both British and American subjects.

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HURRICANE HURRY, BY W.H.G. KINGSTON.