Books: Child Witch

THE TRIUMPH OP YOUTH—Jacob Wassermann—Boni & Liveright ($2). Bishop Philip Adolph of Wurzburg has a sister-in-law, Baroness Theodata of Ehrenburg and a nephew, her son, Ernest. It is because of Ernest's remarkable propensity for inventing fictions that his uncle, personifying the credulous cruelty of the early 17th Century, supposes the youth to be inhabited by evil powers. The child is clapped into a dungeon, made to watch his erratically lovely mother undergo tortures, urged like Joan of Arc to confess sins of whose existence he is unaware. The triumph of youth is achieved when...