"GALLOWS' Orchard, a first novel by Claire Spencer (wife of Harrison Smith, her publisher) has everything and is everything necessary to make it an extraordinary good novel.

Writing in a style excellently her story, Miss Spencer tells straightlaced jealousies, prejudices, and oruelties of the inhabitants of a small Scottish village kill the independent Effie Gallows and ruin the lives of Schoolmaster John and Minister Kennith, who had loved Effie and been friendly to her.

As a rule, dialect stories, ladened down with spurious local color, and almost comically heavy tragedy, are the inevitable result of attempts to tell of Life in the North Carolina Mts., the Norwegian fjords, the Normandy fishing villages, or the Scottish Highlands, but "Gallows' Orchard" has none of these faults. It suggests power and strength without making its principal character spit tobacco juice on his or her hands. Its catastrophe really is tragic, and even though the whole story is one of tragedy, it is not lacking in beauty.

Miss Spencer's style is as surely feminine as was Elinor Wylie's in her novels, and, to pay a high compliment, it resembles considerably the fine writing of Sylvia Townsend Warner, eminently finds Lawrence a highly original and perfectly sincere genius without a prototype in literature. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that those who have a knowledge of Lawrence outside of the police court will find her observations among the most sympathetic and appreciative that have been written