villains who possess sumptuous subterranean palaces and torture-chambers in "her own romantic town" of Glasgow, the last place in the world where we should reasonably expect to find them. "The one essential feature," Mr. Lang observes, "in a truly successful tale is that there should be an ingénue, as pure as poor, who is debarred by conspiracies from the enjoyment of a prodigious fortune." This is a favorite device with weekly papers at home, and the serial story, on either side of the Atlantic, is perforce a little more stirring in its character than that presented to us in finished form through the medium of the penny novelette. With the first, the "strong situation" is serviceable as a decoy to lure the reader into purchasing the following number. With the second, no such artifice is needed or employed. The buyer has his pennyworth already in hand; and a very good pennyworth it is, judged by quantity alone. Wilkie Collins tells us how he tried vainly to extract from a shopman an opinion as to which was the best journal to select, and how the shopman persisted, very naturally, in saying that there was no choice,—one was every bit as long as
