[Review of The Wife of His Youth]

A NEW interpreter of negro character in the South comes from North Carolina,--Charles W. Chestnutt. He is not after the laurels of George Chandler Harris, or any one else. His collection, "The Wife of his Youth, and Other Stories," entitles him to a good-sized wreath of his own. In "The Wife of his Youth," when the well-to do, cultured society Negro publicly acknowledges that wrinkled, bent old colored mammy that comes tramping to his door as his lost slave wife, the climax is one seldom surpassed for dramatic interest. There are other stories, some full of rollicking negro drollery, some indescribably pathetic, all master delineations of a race piquant enough to test the powers of the greatest artist. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. $1.50.)