"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories," by Oscar Wilde, is a vastly amusing little volume. It is cheap in price, it is artistically bound and printed, and the four tales it contains are all interesting. The two longer ones, "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and "The Canterville Ghost," are perhaps the best. The first of these is delightfully whimsical. Young Lord Arthur, engaged to the beautiful Sybil Merton—Mr. Oscar Wilde is evidently fond of the name Sybil—spends an evening with a duchess who has a fad for chiromancy. While there he is induced to have his hand examined by the eminent specialist Mr. Podgers. Podgers announces that the Lord Arthur is destined to commit a murder. This upsets the equanimity of the young man. Clearly he cannot marry Sybil—at least not till he has got the murder over. So he ruminates thereon, postpones the wedding, and decides to put away his estimable old aunt, Lady Clementina Beauchamp. This aged dame suffers from heartburn, so he prescribes one of his infallible pilules in which he has put a deadly dose of aconite. She promises to take it, but neglects to do so, and dies shortly afterwards a natural death. Thus foiled, Lord Arthur attempts to blow up the Dean of Chichester, another distant relative, with an alarum clock set with dynamite, but unluckily the thing won't work, and once more he has to put off the wedding. In the end he comes across the redoubtable Podgers himself strolling one dark night along the Embankment, so he catches him by the coat tails and flings him into the river. A few days afterwards, to his intense relief, he reads in the paper an announcement of the suicide of Podgers, and his conscience being thus clear he marries the beautiful Sybil, and all ends happily. "The Canterville Ghost" is perhaps not so amusing as Mr. Andrew Lang's "In Castle Perilous," of which it may remind the reader; but it is nevertheless very funny. It would be unfair to the author to say anything about the plot of this or the other two tales left; but readers may be assured that they will not be bored for a moment during the perusal of them. The little volume is not nearly so replete with paradoxical turns as the "Picture of Dorian Gray," but the good things are not wanting. Of the Lady Windermere the author says, "She was now forty years of age, childless, and with that inordinate passion for pleasure which is the secret of remaining young." "If a woman can't make her mistakes charming, she is only a female," says another. A young girl tries to persuade the ghost to emigrate to America, but the shade demurs on the ground that he thinks he would not like it. "I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities," says the maid, satirically. "No ruins! no curiosities!" answers the ghost. "You have your navy and your manners." Surely this is very excellent persiflage.