AMONG THE BOOKS.
(From tho " Ofcago Witness.'")

01 Frank Melton's Luck; or Off to New Zealand." By Thos. Cottle. Auck land : H. Brett..
We read the first fow chapters of thi? book from a sense of duty and a cons-ciontioua desire to do justice to a colonial author, whose preface intimated thab his aim was to realistically and faithfully depict -tation lifo in New Zealand ; wo read fche balance wibh oub rising,, because wo liked ib. The writer has very sensibly woven his description of tho phase of colonial life fco which ho refers infco a narrative, ostensibly autobiographical, which has the merest thread for a plofc, ib ia true, bub which successfully sugarcoats the pill he desires bo administer. Nofc thafc fcho story itself is altogether uninteresting. Ib is a page or so from the lives of a number of commonplace persons, who are animated with tho same passions, moved by the same desires, as tho people whom we meet every day, and ifc has for its basis fche old, old -fcory—old as the hills, unvarying in its genoral features, and yob to each one who enacts ifc over again, having something which none of the others ever possessed.
