"Hell fer Sartain," by John Fox, Jr., (Harper and Brothers), is a collection of short stories of the Kentucky mountains which have appeard from time to time in the magazines. Many of them are in dialect, but the intending reader need not be alarmed, for the dialect is not at all difficult to read and is extremely interesting owing to its unique character.

Mr. Fox was graduated from Harvard with the class of '83, returned to Kentucky, and after a few years settled in the mountains, where he has since lived. Thus he has discovered a new field in fiction and has made excellent use of it. The stories in dialect are mostly humorous. The humor is not insistent, and the reader is flattered by having much left to his intelligence. The same may be said of the narration in the other stories. These are told with a simplicity and directness suggestive of Kipling. This is more especially true of "Through the Gap." The last in the volume, "A Purple Rhododendron," is intensely dramatic and carries the reader by main force up to the crisis. None of the stories are more than a few pages in length, yet each is a distinct and lasting picture.