The Real New Zealand.

BY far the most graphic, witty and altogether satisfying picture of New Zealand life that has yet come from a novelist's pen is Alan Mulgan's new book “Spur of Morning,” which I have just read with intense enjoyment, and many chuckles. Town life, sport and politics, and the life of the open air, of bush and tussockland, are blended in a narrative that preserves perfect fidelity to conditions as we know them in New Zealand. The period in which the story is set is thirty to forty years ago, and the manners and ways of a community somewhat less sophisticated than it is to-day are reproduced with a particularity that betokens thorough knowledge and a quick eye for the little comedies of life.

Mr. Mulgan has a lively and whimsical wit. But there is more than that. The writer knows his native New Zealand; he describes the free-handed hospitality of the people in the out-back, particularly the big sheep station people and the heroic toil of settlement, and there are perfect little vignettes of shore and hill and forest-charm, this with an economy of adjectives that betokens a thorough artist in words.

The political portraits are amazingly well-drawn. Seddon is there, and W. P. Reeves and many another—how good! Their disguises and names do not avail them much; they are there to the life.

Mr. Mulgan certainly has an original way with him. Nowhere in the book, not even in the preface, does he mention the name New Zealand; but the identity of the Southern land described is, of course, perfectly clear to many besides New Zealanders. It cannot be mistaken for any other! I can find only one New Zealand place-name in it and that is Hikurangi, which Mr. Mulgan has apparently dropped in, in the spirit of a detective-story writer who thinks his readers are fairly entitled to a bit of a clue here and there. But the cities of “Eden” and “Wellesley,” there is no need to puzzle over their identity any more than there is over the masterful premier Braxton, who knew exactly what the people wanted and gave it to them with both hands.