of the smithy, which must have been of service to him when he came to write The Broad Highway. Very badly equipped for the struggle of life in a strange land he rashly betook himself to New York, where his wife--he married when quite young--had friends. I imagine that a great gulf is fixed between the world to which Mr. Farnol introduces us in his romances and the early struggles that he met with in New York. For a long period he was a scene painter at the Astor Theatre, "and must," a friend assures us, "have daubed miles of scenery in his time."  His income from this work was supplemented by the sale of occasional short stories. And then, in this most practical of cities, amid an atmosphere of up-to-dateness and progress of which those who only know the quieter ways of London can form no idea, he wrote his romance of an unprogressive world with stage coaches, boxers, and idyllic love--the world that Mr. Austin Dobson has so happily presented in his poem, "A Gentleman of the Old School":

Mr. Farnol was born in Birmingham some thirty-six years ago. His early years were spent at Lee, in Kent, where he and a younger brother Ewart, who fell in the Boer War, went to school. Our author recalls with gratitude that his mother never failed to believe in his possession of a literary gift, and had, in his boyhood, hopes of seeing him an author, and faith that he would be a successful one. But circumstances seemed to throw him into a quite different kind of activity, and everything pointed to the probability that his livelihood would be obtained in a world remote from literature. Schooldays were followed by an apprenticeship to engineering in London and in Birmingham. His experience included the work of the smithy, which must have been of service to him when he came to write 

. Very badly equipped for the struggle of life in a strange land he rashly betook himself to New York, where his wife--he married when quite young--had friends. I imagine that a great gulf is fixed between the world to which Mr. Farnol introduces us in his romances and the early struggles that he met with in New York. For a long period he was a scene painter at the Astor Theatre, "and must," a friend assures us, "have daubed miles of scenery in his time."  His income from this work was supplemented by the sale of occasional short stories. And then, in this most practical of cities, amid an atmosphere of up-to-dateness and progress of which those who only know the quieter ways of London can form no idea, he wrote his romance of an unprogressive world with stage coaches, boxers, and idyllic love--the world that Mr. Austin Dobson has so happily presented in his poem, "A Gentleman of 

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