Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City

A street boy in Edinburgh with a thief for a father lives by his wits along the railway line, and refuses every rescue that comes with conditions. S. R. Crockett was a Free Church minister at Penicuik who left the pulpit when his novels began to sell, and this is his best and least sentimental. Cleg's code is worked out in detail, and the book respects it. Fifty-five plates after painters including David Wilkie and George Clausen, from a cottage toilet to a boy cutting a stick, give this Edinburgh story its gallery of ordinary lives.