ABOUT BOOK

Mr. Mitford has put the lively, if somewhat bloodthirsty story, of The Induna's Wife in the mouth of an old Zulu chief, who is the hero of 'The King's Assegai' and 'The White Shield.' Untuswa is this gentleman's name, and if we had not become acclimatised to his proceedings, so to say, we might be inclined to pronounce his proceedings ghastly and horrifying in the extreme. He cracks a skull with as much relish as an ordinary man cracks filberts, and the details of the oozing brains are not spared, while the impalements and other forms of ghastly torture in vogue with the respective tyrants whom it is his glory to serve make record of mere murders seem commonplace and pleasant by comparison. Those who know Mr. Mitford's characteristic romances will be at home at once with the story told by Untuswa in the waggon to the author--the fighting, the 'smelling out,' the desperate escapes, reprisals, and wholesale butchery.