THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE

It is several years since Mr. Percy Marks, by writing the 'Plastic Age," filled schoolboys with a keen eagerness for going to college and their parents with grave apprehensions about sending them there. Having sought in vain for another theme which would capitalize the furor he had made, the author has gone back to the adventures of the wild Cynthia and the experimentative Carl Peters, whom readers will recall as leaving the campus under rather a cloud. In the new book they are presented five years after.

Such novels are bound to be in the nature of an anticlimax. Who, in an earlier day, would have been interested in the further triumphs of Frank Merriwell or the incredible Brown after they left New Haven and Cambridge? All collegiate heroes of fiction draw the public interest because they are supposed to throw the spotlight on what goes on, and how, behind the academic walls. It is the wise author who lets his dashing young rascal fade into obscurity with his A. B. under his arm and the aureole of glamor still about his head. One had as leave read about Tom Swift after his adventures are over and his magic flying machine stabled in the garage, as pursue the maturity of the plastic age settling into stodgy concrete.