Nearly Lost but Dearly Won   By: Theodore P. Wilson

by the Reverend T.P. Wilson, M.A. Wilson wrote several books around the end of the 1880s. He had won a prize some ten years previously for the best book assessed by The Band of Hope, a Society devoted to helping the young never to take up drinking. This present book gives you the impression that it might well have been another one written to be entered into the competition. Anyway, if it was, it didn't win.

It's quite a good story, but I think its trouble is, that it is neither a book that would appeal directly to teenagers, which one supposes was its target audience, nor yet to young adults. There is nothing like the amount of action we saw in "Frank Oldfield."

it is rather a short book, but one of its crowning glories is the set of ten line drawings by "MDH". These are really superb, full of action and life, particularly where there are children or horses. I wish all childrens' books were as well illustrated. NH

NEARLY LOST BUT DEARLY WON

BY THE REVEREND T.P. WILSON, M.A.

CHAPTER ONE.

ESAU TANKARDEW.

Certainly, Mr Tankardew was not a pattern of cleanliness, either in his house or his person. Someone had said of him sarcastically, "that there was nothing clean in his house but his towels ;" and there was a great deal of truth in the remark. He seemed to dwell in an element of cobwebs; the atmosphere in which he lived, rather than breathed, was apparently a mixture of fog and dust. Everything he had on was faded everything that he had about him was faded the only dew that seemed to visit the jaded looking shrubs in the approach to his dwelling was mil dew. Dilapidation and dinginess went hand in hand everywhere: the railings round the house were dilapidated some had lost there points, others came to an abrupt conclusion a few inches above the stone work from which they sprang; the steps were dilapidated one of them rocked as you set your foot upon it, and the others sloped inwards so as to hold treacherous puddles in wet weather to entrap unwary visitors; the entrance hall was dilapidated; if ever there had been a pattern to the paper, it had now retired out of sight and given place to irregular stains, which looked something like a vast map of a desolate country, all moors and swamps; the doors were dilapidated, fitting so badly, that when the front door opened a sympathetic clatter of all the lesser ones rang through the house; the floors were dilapidated, and afforded ample convenience for easy egress and ingress to the flourishing colonies of rats and mice which had established themselves on the premises; and above all, Mr Tankardew himself was dilapidated in his dress, and in his whole appearance and habits his very voice was dilapidated, and his words slipshod and slovenly.

And yet Mr Tankardew was a man of education and a gentleman, and you knew it before you had been five minutes in his company. He was the owner of the house he lived in, on the outskirts of the small town of Hopeworth, and also of considerable property in the neighbourhood. Amongst other possessions, he was the landlord of two houses of some pretensions, a little out in the country, which were prettily situated in the midst of shrubberies and orchards. In one of these houses lived a Mr Rothwell, a gentleman of independent means; in the other a Mrs Franklin, the widow of an officer, with her daughter Mary, now about fifteen years of age.