PITY THE DUMB OX.

The article examines the book "The Little Madeleine," by Robert Henrey. Henrey writes about a Paris unknown to many-dirty, squirming in poverty, damp, peopled by puzzled men who work hard then sleep or drink, and by women who sew, endlessly, and seek one another in alliance against the men. Henrey has a sense for irony and an eye for the grotesque. But she tries so hard to avoid sentimentality that her situations and her people are seldom evoked, they are too often merely described.