Come Spring

IN a postscript to this book Mr. Williams points out that ’an historical novel may as justly deal with the lives of people who were important not individually but in the mass’ as with generals, statesmen, kings, or queens. And so he has written a long, leisurely historical novel filled with the minutiæ of daily existence in a frontier town of colonial Maine. House raisings, corn huskings, birthings, moose and bear hunting, clearing land and ploughing it, with plenty of bundling, rum drinking, and other forms of innocent diversion on the side — these made up the routine of frontier life 165 years ago. A certain amount of heart interest keeps the story moving, but the book is worth more as Americana than as romance.