--"The Barton Experiment," by "the author of 'Helen's Babies,'"[L] cannot be called a novel--hardly a tale--and yet it is a story--the story of a great "temperance movement" at Barton, which is supposed to be a village somewhere at the west--in Kentucky, we should say, from certain local references. We do not know who the author of Helen's Babies is--he, and Helen, and her babies being alike strangers to us; but he is a clever writer, and a humorist, with no little dramatic power. His personages are studies from nature, and have individuality and life; albeit they reveal a somewhat narrow horizon of observation. He uses largely, but always humorously, the western style of exaggeration; as, for example, when he makes one of his reformers tell a steamboat captain that if he will stop drinking whiskey, he will make a reputation, and "be as famous as the Red River raft or the Mammoth Cave--_the only thing of the sort west of the Alleghanies_." He describes his people in a way that shows that he has them in the eye of his imagination; as in this portrait of a Mrs. Tappelmine: "With face, hair, eyes, and garments of the same color, the color itself being neutral; small, thin, faded, inconspicuous, poorly clad, bent with labors which had yielded no return, as dead to the world as saints strive to be, _yet remaining in the world for the sake of those whom she had often wished out of it_," etc. The book is in every way clever, and its purpose is admirable--the lesson which it is written to teach being that personal effort and personal sacrifice on the part of reformers is necessary to reclaim hard drinkers. But the radical fault of all such moral story writing is that the writer makes his puppets do as he likes. The drinking steamboat captain yields to the persuasions of his friend, and even submits to necessary personal restraint. But how if he had not yielded? Old Tappelmine gives up his whiskey for the sake of money and employment, which inducements are strongly backed by his neutral-colored wife; but how if he had been brutally selfish and immovable? In both these cases, and in all the others, failure was at least quite as likely as success. People in real life cannot be managed as they can upon paper. Still the book contains a truth, and is likely to do good.