BY H. B. SLINGERLAND 1L.

There is little doubt about it, in the matter of being up-to-the-minute, Americans are, as we put it, "there". In all that we did the day 'before yesterday, we like to feel that there is a touch of the day after tomorrow. And so, with some regret, I began to read Mr. Hudson's "Abbe Pierre" which, the wrapper modestly asserted, was only a "novel of today". For the first page or two, I wondered if I were wasting my time in the consideration of something no further advanced than the present. Then, upon my awakening consciousness was impressed the realization that I was reading a novel which, in structure and in style, is decidedly next week.

At last I have found it: the Novel Without a Plot! Poe maintained that certain dank gardens cried aloud for murder. And murders we have had until the very edgings of the pages turned red. Naturally, the concerse of the proposition should be true. Mr. Hudson has been the first to make it so. Certain bright gardens cry for nothing at all. To be sure, "Abbe Pierre" has a binding thread the romance of David Ware, an American professor "from the department of Ohio", and Germaine Sance, a daughter of Gascony. Yet that is not "Abbe Pierre". For "Abbe Pierre" is nothing more nor less than Mr. Hudson, in priestly disguise, enjoying the gentle beauties of Gascony.

Nothing at all. And yet, how much. Three hundred pages of gently undulating hills where the clouds bank up behind the old stone towers, and where the little streams go down to the rivers and the rivers down to the sea. Where on sunny days the Pyrenees can be seen rising above the haze to the south, where the peasants sing in their rippling patois:

"There are nine wagons of fine wheat in yonder plain;

The heads are golden, and the stalks are silvery".

Aignan, Margouet-Meymes, and Sabazan, with the friendly little villages all about, how Mr. Hudson makes them speak! Not only to each other, with bonfires, as on St. John's Eve, but to the reader, through the clatter of sabots on their hard white streets, through the children's voices between the plastered walls of their homes. Nothing of great importance has ever happened in Aignan, and nothing ever will. Even the cinema which the little doctor projects never reaches realization. And Tarbes Toulouse, Bayonne remain the measure of things.

For sake of Aignan we are willing to forgive Mr. Hudson his hero and heroine. After all, he has to sell his book, and without them how could he make "Abbe Pierre" possible? There must be, we know, "the rich happiness of young love striving through crowding difficulties to the fullest measure of attainment". People expect it. Just as they expect a certain amount of hacking at "the roots of human nature".

For the rest, hats off to Mr. Hudson! As a certain well-known periodical would phrase it. "We nominate for the Hall of Fame, Mr. Hudson, because he has written a "novel of today" with a subject and a predicate in every sentence"