This is an Illinois novel, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and written by Joseph Kirkland.
The hero, Zury, highly deserves his title. Indeed he boasts of it, for he has been led into parsimony by the straits of the parental pioneer household, which his smartness lifts into affluence. The pictures of the family's development are acutely drawn, and Zury's love for his little sick sister is naturally outlined.
The later chapters are equally interesting, but in a very different way. There comes into the story a cultivated Massachusetts girl, from the Lowell Spindles and Brook Farm. Anne Sparrow has something unknown and disagreeable in her past, but she is a success in the district school. Zury admires her; and this leads to moral complications,—treated with a delicacy that would do credit to Mrs. Oliphant, and yet with a frank realism Zola might envy. Anne weds first a shiftless and foolish young fellow; and she does not become Mrs. Zury till that gentleman has attained his political longings, buried his second wife, become reasonably generous, and her twins are grown up.
