Pantheon," is a masterpiece of caricature, and the minor characters of the rich haberdasher and his ambitious-to-be-a-man-of-the-world clerk are perpetual joys. The squabbles and petty jealousies of the clerks and bell-boys are also highly diverting. With the women Mr. Payne is not so successful, though he places the difficulties of the cigar girl's position very clearly before one, - and therein drives home a strong moral to the thoughtless and flirtatious hotel-lounger. Among the other merits of the book is the decided one of brevity. Mr. Payne has known enough not to give us too much of a good thing, which knowledge many writers of farce, notably Mr. Robert Hichens, so often lack.

So much were we impressed with the cleverness of Mr. Payne, that we were impelled to read, after finishing "The Duchess," his first book, "The Mills of Man," published last year. A reading of this book only confirms us in the impression that Mr. Payne is a writer of unusual insight and of remarkable strength of expression. This book is wholly different from The Duchess." It is a story of Chicago politics and "bossism," far better than most of its kind, because more original and less mechanical. It is a strong, fine story, containing excellent character drawing and much matter which concerns every city-dweller in the land. In this book, again, the women are far less successful than the men, a fault which Mr. Payne will have to remedy before he can become popular. But despite his many faults he is, in our opinion, one of the men to be counted on. No man who can hit so straight from the shoulder is likely to fall by the wayside.

GREEN MANSIONS. By W. H. Hudson. (G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.50.)

THIS is called in the sub-title "A Romance of the Tropical Forest," and the scene is the South American wilderness. He who tells the story, a certain Mr. Abel, is a political refugee from Venezuela, who escapes from his country, wanders in the forests, and comes upon a camp of Indians by whom he is halfadopted, and with whom he lives till he enters the haunted forest and sees the mysterious being who fascinates him, and lures him on to follow her into the depths of the forest. Here he is bitten by a snake, rescued by this beautiful, fairylike woman, taken to the lodge where she lives with an old Spaniard, who claims her as his granddaughter, and there lives for weeks trying to solve the mystery of her nature, which is more akin to the birds and beasts than to humankind. The love passion is finally aroused in her, and, after an expedition to her former haunts, all seems to be going well when she is destroyed, roasted out of a tree, by the Indians, who believe her a witch; and the man goes mad, recovering, however, to tell his story.

As will be seen, the story is one capable of great poetical imagination and wonderful word pictures of the primeval forest. But, unfortunately, the author is unable either to arouse the imagination or to picture the wilderness in any save a most prosaic and uninspiring fashion. He completely fails to invest this mysterious being of the forest with any of the subtle charm and delicacy which such a creation demands, and his pictures of the forest are tame and commonplace. Lacking the quality of charm and of picturesque description, this story, having no foundation in fact and no interest of plot, naturally fails to make any appeal to the reader. About all that one can say of it

is that it might have been, in able hands, a most fascinating and delightful sort of fairy-tale, or a terrible and wonderful mystery. In the hands, for instance, of Charles Warren Stoddard or of Joseph Conrad it might have been a masterpiece. As it is, we can scarcely fail to see how any one could find it anything but a lamentable case of might have been..

THE ROSE OF OLD ST. LOUIS. By Mary Dillon. (The Century Company. $1.50.)

HERE is a kaleidoscopic historical romance, which follows so closely on the heels of Mr. Churchill's worthy and tiresome tome, "The Crossing," dealing with almost the same subjects, as to lead one to suspect that the tribe of publishers intend to reap their profits from the public interest in the St. Louis Exposition and all that pertains thereto. The two books naturally invite comparison, and it must be confessed that Miss Dillon's book is as historically accurate and far more interesting than Mr. Churchill's. The first part of "The Crossing" is superior to the entire "Rose of Old St. Louis," but the rest of it is wofully inferior. Miss Dillon's hero is a man of flesh and blood, Mr. Churchill's a pompous prig; her heroine a piquante, witching maiden, his a Talleyrand in petticoats; her story of their loves and ventures holds, while his bores, the reader.

Nevertheless, Miss Dillon's "Rose" is not without its thorns, the thorniest of which have to do with France and Bonaparte, especially with the hero's adventures in the domain of the First Consul. Here the throttle-valve of melodrama is pulled open to its widest extent, to the danger of running the tale off the track of plausibility. One hardly knows whether to be thrilled with excitement or convulsed with laughter over the hero's escapades in Bonaparte's palace and the way in which he emerges therefrom with flying colors. It cannot be admitted, either, that the writer has been as happy in depicting Bonaparte as she has in portraying her other historical characters. Now and again, too, there are bits which betray the 'prentice hand. But, on the whole, the book is an entertaining and interesting one, and the author deserves congratulations for so good a first book.

THE LITTLE VANITIES OF MRS. WHITTAKER. By John Strange Winter. (Funk & Wagnalls Company. $1.00 net.)

BEHOLD a novel that is a novelty, if nothing more. No dainty maid is the heroine, or dashing youth the hero. In these places are seen a staid, comfortable, middle-aged couple, of whom the wife plays the leading part in this bright domestic comedy. Mrs. Regina Whittaker, whose "little vanities" furnish the title to this tale, is a typical British matron, fair, fat, and forty-odd, with a loving, prosaic husband, and two emancipated daughters. How she suddenly dropped her "career" of reformer and philanthropist, and proceeded to reverse her whole course of life, physical, mental, and sartorial, how her family received this change of base on her part, and what its motive and result was, are revealed to the reader in a series of amusing and delightful, at times mildly surprising, situations.

It is said that in every subject under the sun lurks romance, but, at first sight, a middle-aged matron, with a superfluity of flesh, and a pedagogic mind, seems to fall outside the pale of that assertion. Yet true romance is there, sweet and pure, with plenty of humor,

and not without a little pathos. Hardly too much praise can be given the author for her original and sympathetic treatment of an apparently commonplace theme. Of late, her charm and skill, made first known in "Bootle's Baby," had seemed to fade, but in this book they have bloomed forth again, for which her old admirers will give thanks.

self refers mainly to his Indian campaigns, and he writes as he shoots, straight and to the point; a story full of thrilling adventures presented in language easy to read, and in a style that adventurous boys will enjoy. There is much more of his life that might be mentioned that would be even more interesting; perhaps his modesty prevents him from writing about all of his career. A friend, however, contributes a brief

Of all the books written for children and young people, none are to be more heartily recommended than those which teach kindness and gentleness toward the four-footed creatures, — and even the older people need to have their sensibilities stirred occasionally by such a book.

There is a fairly respectable list of these publications already in the field, and each season brings new recruits. One of the most promising books of this sort recently published is Mrs. Baxendale's story of "Fairy," an Italian gazelle hound, which was her pet and companion for thirteen years. The illustrations show that "Fairy" was a beautiful little creature, and Mrs. Baxendale's account of her short life reveals her as the possessor of an almost human intelligence, and many attributes worthy of emulation even by us. As one reads of her loyalty and devotion, her patience and courage, the author's desire to perpetuate her memory in print is easily understood. Mrs. Baxendale has written of "Fairy's " little life with rare sympathy, and has made her the centre of a charming story which has strong human interest, also, while the fact that it is all absolutely true gives it a value above a mere work of fiction. It is an excellent book for the young people, and the older ones will also appreciate this account of "Fairy's" doings, and will thoroughly enjoy the many delightful bits of humor which are scattered throughout the pages.

THE INTERLOPER. By Violet Jacob.
Page & Company. $1.50.)

as a pony express rider, as a scout, and his celebrated show, which, as the man outside would say, "has exhibited before the crowned heads of Europe," as well as all over this country and others. This fills the small volume devoted to the life of the famous scout whose adventures would furnish abundant good material for several large ones.

News and Notes

IT is announced that Messrs. Lee and Shepard have purchased the entire assets and good-will of the Lothrop Publishing Company, which made an assignment last February. The corporation is to be known as the Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company, and has been formed to conduct a general publishing business, which is to comprise all the publications of both houses, and to assume all rights belonging to them, also all obligations of Lee and Shepard and of the business of the Lothrop Publishing Company, as conducted by its assignees since the time of assignment. All affairs of the new corporation will be under the direction of Mr. W. F. Gregory, for the past six years manager for Lee and Shepard. Both imprints will be retained through the present season, and the business features of the two lines of publication will be kept entirely distinct till January 1, 1905. The new corporation will be located after the first of the year at 93 Federal Street. It is a pleasure to know that these two so long and so favorably known houses are to continue business in Boston.

THIS is a conventional, and conventionally well written, tale of the course of true love which does not run smoothly, till the last page. The scene is a small Scotch town in the early nineteenth century. The people are the orphaned heroine, living with the maiden aunt; the hero an illegitimate child, the interloper, of course; the lawyer villain; two maiden aunts of the Cranford type; the whole-hearted, one-legged fireeater, who helps to foil the villain; the unacknowledged father of the hero, and a host of minor conventionalities. One character, the Queen of the Cadgers, a Scotch dialect-talking old woman, the dea ex machina who brings things right at the right moment, is slightly less common in fiction than the rest of them, though she, too, is perfectly well known to all novel readers. Given these characters, any one who reads much can make up the story, just as well as Mrs. Jacob, the author; and it will take him less time than it would to read her book.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUFFALO BILL. By Colonel W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill). (Harper & Brothers. 60 cents.)

WHEN Buffalo Bill was eleven years old he shot his first Indian, and became a hero. Since that famous event he has shot more Indians, buffaloes, Mormon Danites, and other dangerous animals, and has become a greater hero. The part of his story written by him

practically the same as those he witnessed in his dream. The incident seems almost to establish the fact of telepathic communication between an animal and a man.

Another peculiar fact in connection with this story is that Mr. Haggard's last book, "The Brethren," is founded upon a mysterious revelation, which comes to one of the leading characters in a dream. "The Brethren" will be published

in America this fall by McClure-Phillips.

66

L. C. PAGE & COMPANY, on September 10th, publish Lilian Bell's important new book, At Home with the Jardines," which is, in a sense, a sequel to "Abroad with the Jimmies," which met with such success two years since, for it has among its characters the Jimmies, sister Bee, and many of their delightful companions, together with new acquaintances equally charming and amusing. In view of the fact that it is commonly supposed that a work of fiction rarely lives more than a year after its publication, it is interesting to note that Abroad with the Jimmies" has just gone to press for the eighth time.

Ir seems to be the irony of fate that Guy Wetmore Carryl should not have lived to see the success of his most popular book, "The Transgression of Andrew Vane" (Holt). This strong love-story of the American colony in Paris is just being sent to press for the fourth time.

THERE are very few children old enough to read who are not familiar with one or another of Miss Gertrude Smith's delightful stories. The author is fond of saying that not only all of the little people in her tales, but also all to whom she is writing, live on the beautiful road." There lived 'Roggie and Reggie," with their well-known sisters. 66 Arabella and Araminta." On the same beautiful road live the lovable "Janey and Josie and Jo," and right near by live the clever "Peter and Ellen." Many children have asked Miss

Smith where this beautiful road is. Is it in California, where she was born and lived as a little child? Is it in the beautiful valley along the American River? Surely it can eventually be found, for nowhere are there more beautiful homes of comfort and happiness than are to be found in these stories. But Miss Smith insists that all of her little readers live in the same place, and she says that some day she hopes to write and tell exactly where it is.

THE disposition of artists not to be content with the gifts which nature bestows upon them has been often observed. Salvini always lamented the fact that he was not an operasinger. Booth suspected that his strongest forte was comedy; the "Fool's Revenge was his favorite piece. Gladstone, with a knowledge of what his great rival Disraeli had done, secretly cherished the belief that he could write a sentimental story. Eugene Field at one time aspired to be an end man in a minstrel show. Kipling, with his jungle stories, his "Kim," and his inimitable place as a prose writer, has a greater pride in his weaker verse, and is prone to break into political numbers of more or less doubt on every occasion of local excitement. Charles Dickens yearned to be a playwright, as did Wilkie Collins; and Pinero, who is now the maker of master dramas, sighs because he is not a novelist. Nor are the novelists of to-day free from the same complaint. The author of "Lux Crucis," published by the Harpers, a story which bids fair to equal the records of "Ben-Hur," is a corporation lawyer on Wall Street, where for ten years past he has given sage counsel and grown rich and poor with the change of the market; but, like Samuel Warren, who wrote "Ten Thousand a Year," Owen Wister, James Lane Allen, and other Blackstonians, Mr. Gardenhire's literary tendency would not down.

IRVING BACHELLER's new novel, “Vergilius,” is said to have none of the time-honored features of the story of Rome and Jerusalem with which readers are familiar. All its scenes and incidents are in a sense novel and unhackneyed. There is no fight in an amphitheatre, and no imperial thumb-turning to decide the fate of the victim; no burning of Christians, nor, indeed, any actual scenes of torture. The story is promised to be one of novel and unabated interest from the first to the last line.

66

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD has again achieved success in her philanthropic work Five years ago she established a branch for special instruction and care of crippled children in the vacation school of the Passmore Edwards Settlement in London, which was founded through her influence. These little handicapped children have been tenderly nursed and taught trades and arts, and the tiny school is now able to announce that one boy, formerly a helpless invalid, has been apprenticed to a firm of gold and silver smiths; another boy with spinal complaint and another with clubfeet have been apprenticed to an artist in photogravure; another pupil is a printer's reader; one girl is serving in a milliner's atelier, another is at the Art School, and will finish her training eventually at the Royal School of Art Needlework." The idea has been to train these physically helpless children in the use of their brains, that their lives may be happy and self-supporting in spite of their infirmities.

A. E. W. MASON'S new novel, "The Truants," which is appearing serially in Harper's Weekly, will be published by Harper & Brothers in the fall. Mr. Mason is the author of "The Four Feathers," which achieved much success last year. "The Truants" is a lively story of London life.

MR. BURTON E. STEVENSON, author of "The Holladay Case" (which Messrs. Henry Holt and Company have printed five times here, which has been reprinted in England, and is being translated in Germany), has had an amusing experience. He has received letters from several widely separated members of the Holladay family in this country. The first letter came to the author from a young lady in Chicago, who expressed surprise that a name so unusual as hers should have been used for the heroine of the story, and begged to know whether the author had ever known any one of that name. Next came a letter from a prominent lawyer of Tennessee, who made the same query, stating that his family was the only one in America spelling their name in just that way. Still another branch of the family was heard from in California, and now it looks as though there might be a reunion of the Holladays, if this sort of thing keeps on. Mr. Stevenson was not aware that the name was an especially peculiar one, although he never knew any one named

Holladay, but evolved it, after some experimenting, as attractive and easily pronounced. The story of which Miss Frances Holladay is the heroine deals, it will be remembered, with a Wall Street mystery, the scenes shifting afterward to an ocean steamer and to France.

THE new movement in Irish literature, which is a source of pride to every patriotic Irishman, has at last commanded the attention of the world. Until the light of her literature and learning was well-nigh extinguished by invasions and oppressions which were to last over fourteen hundred years, and of which the end is not yet, Ireland was the island of saints and scholars, and kept alight the lamp of scholarship when the rest of Europe was in darkness. And when forced to find literary expression in an alien tongue, the work of Irishmen such as Goldsmith, Swift, Sterne, Knowles, Sheridan, and many others was counted by the world as English product, and "The Deserted Village," "The Traveller," "The Rivals," "She Stoops to Conquer," "The School for Scandal," "Tristam Shandy," Gulliver's Travels," and "Virginius" added lustre to the fame, not of the nation that had given them birth, but to the nation that had oppressed them.

66

The list of names of Irish poets, novelists, orators, and humorists is not only a long and impressive one, and one of which any nation might well be proud, but if the names of Irishmen be taken from the roll of England's great poets and authors, it will make a great difference in the importance of English literary and historical productions.

It is a pleasure, therefore, to chronicle the successful consummation of a work which has recognized Irish productions as essentially Irish. Not only has Mr. Charles Welsh, the managing editor, patriotically demanded that the world. give unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, by recognizing fully the nationality of the great minds who trace back to Erin their place of birth, but he has intelligently recognized the new movement in literature and art that is again “making Ireland the home of saints and scholars and the seat of learning in Europe."

The broad scope of the work can be imagined when it is noted that Irish literary production is fully represented from the old Gaelic manuscripts of the sixth century to the latest modern production of W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seumas MacManus. Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinckson, James Jeffrey Roche, and others whose names are on the lips of all who appreciate the highest, the brighest, and the best in literature, and that it also includes examples of the work of the writers of to-day who are using the Gaelic as a medium of literary expression. Their work is printed both in Gaelic and in English. This work will be hailed with delight by all Irishmen for its recognition of Irish nationality in its literature, and by the great mass of people other than Irish by reason of the high literary worth of the work.

The title of the work is "Irish Literature," and it will be complete in ten handsome volumes of 450 pages each. The editor-in-chief is the Hon. Justin McCarthy, M. P., with Dr. Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, Dr. M. F. Egan, and J. Jeffrey Roche as associate editors.

The work is fully illustrated in black and white and color, and will be published shortly by John D. Morris & Company of Philadelphia.

THE firm of G. P. Putnam's Sons has always been identified with all movements for the bettering of copyright laws and the protection of the rights of authors and publishers. This house has just issued a volume of value and importance to all those who are interested in the matter of copyright. The title of this work is "Copyright Cases and Decisions," compiled by Arthur S. Hamlin. It contains a summary of the leading American decisions of the law of copyright, and on literary property from 1801 to 1903, together with a selection of recent copyright decisions of the courts of Great Britain and Canada, and the text of the United States Copyright Statutes.

While this volume has been prepared with special reference to the requirements of publishers, authors, and others interested in the protection and sale of copyrighted property, it will be found convenient for the ready reference to copyright decisions by members of the bar, editors, and others seeking information on the subject.

"FERGY the Guide, and His Moral and Instructive Lies about Beasts, Birds, and Fishes." is the title of a rather striking book by H. S. Canfield that Messrs. Henry Holt & Company will issue. There have been a good many serious stories of animal intelligence that have stretched credulity,

pretty hard. These "lies" may prove almost as easy of belief, but also possessed of certain engaging freedom. Mr. Albert D. Blashfield, well known for his funny animal pictures in Life and elsewhere, contributes fifty sketches that aid in smashing the verities.

MR. RANDALL PARRISH, who succeeded so remarkably in striking the public fancy with his first book, When Wilderness was King," will publish through A. C. McClurg & Company this fall another romance which has all the qualities that brought success to his first work. This new romance, which will be called "My Lady of the North," tells the love-story of a "Gray-jacket," and the close of the Civil War has been used as a background for some extraordinary stirring scenes and situations.

THE title of Marie Corelli's new story, which will be published on September 15th, is "God's Good Man A Simple Love Story." Dodd, Mead and Company will publish it in this country.

MR. FRANK MOORE COLBY has written a volume of essays which will shortly be published under the title of "Imaginary Obligations."

The author discusses the tendency of his fellow countrymen to burden themselves too heavily with one another's tastes. He discusses needless duties, especially that chief one of seeming different from what we are, and he draws his illustrations from the talk, oral and printed, of the day. The topics treated are perhaps transitory, but they are bound, nevertheless, to recur. The authors quoted are evanescent, but they are of the kind that will be born again. The author has written about them chiefly because be enjoys their absurdity, and because they seem to him to show incidentally why so many of us grow old rigidly, or develop a sort of spiritual pomposity in our middle age. Our fancied obligations are, therefore, the topics on which Mr. Colby has touched with a light and dexterous hand. It is fencing of the most graceful and exquisite kind, and the little essays are each of them perfect in their way.

THE many admirers of Myrtle Reed will be interested to know that she has written a new book in what is to her an entirely untried field. "The Book of Clever Beasts; or, Studies in Unnatural History" is the title of this work, and it will be illustrated by Peter Newell. Miss Reed's publishers, the Putnam's, plan to issue this volume early in the fall.

"The Book of Clever Beasts" is deliciously humorous, hitting off the many writers who have returned to nature and made intimate friends in the animal world. The author describes the superhuman intelligence to be found by the discerning among our kindred of the wild. All those who love gentle humor will be entertained by the whimsical story of "Little Upsidaisi," and no reader can fail to laugh at the antics of "Jagg the Scootaway Goat."

The illustrations by Peter Newell are in this clever artist's happiest vein, and bring out to the full the humor of the text.

BABIES are probably the same the world over. They speak the same language and give rise to the same problems. The truth of this is testified to by the enthusiasm with which all Australia is reading Josephine Daskam's "Memoirs of a Baby." The Australians evidently recognize the accuracy of the picture Mrs. Bascon has painted, and "Binks" has probably thousands of prototypes in the antipodes.

MR. FRANCIS LYNDE, whose novel, "The Grafters," is destined, according to Life, to please more American readers than any book of the season, was bent on being an author from very early years. But a strong common sense which characterizes all his actions told him that the way to write was first to live. So he lived half a lifetime in the most active occupation he could find, quite largely for the purpose of gathering material for his present calling. Not in any one of his business years did he lose sight of his ideal, which was to settle down with a pen and a pad of paper, in a home of his own, in a study of his own. The purpose has been exactly carried out as planned.

Character-drawing is Mr. Lynde's particular forte. In this he has studied as no great number of his fellow craftsmen have dared to study. He can walk along a street where he knows no one personally and read the character of nine men out of ten in passing, by scanning their faces. A Sherlock Holmes gift, you say with a smile? Not at all. It is the result of long and hard study. And Mr. Lynde can

"SUSAN Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop" is the_title decided upon by Anne Warner for her book of Susan Clegg stories, some of which are now appearing in the Century. Little, Brown & Company will publish the book in the fall. The author has created a quaint and original humorous character in Susan Clegg.

MESSRS. L. C. PAGE & COMPANY, the publishers of "The Motor Pirate," by G. Sidney Paternoster, are wondering if the exciting hold-ups described in the book are responsible for a similar hold-up reported by the Associated Press as having been committed in Pennsylvania a few days since.

If such is the case, the proper thing is for some one to emulate the detective in the book and bring the real highwayman to justice before his escapades become too dangerous to public safety.

The Motor Pirate is an acquaintance more satisfactory between book-covers than in real life.

MR. ALFRED HENRY LEWIS'S new novel, upon which the author has been engaged since the publication of his successful story, "The Boss," will be called “The President." While the new novel is understood to be first of all a story which gives full scope for the author's humor and imagination, he has nevertheless drawn upon his rarely complete knowledge of the inner side of national politics. In the course of the story of president-making, several striking figures and scenes are introduced which some readers may try to identify.

MISS MARY A. JORDAN, professor of English literature in Smith College, has just completed her book on "Correct Writing and Speaking for the Woman's Home Library, edited by Mrs. M. E. Sangster and published by A. S. Barnes & Company.

THOSE readers who are aware that Joseph Conrad, author of "Romance" (McClure-Phillips), is a Pole, have probably frequently wondered at his very English-sounding name. The fact is, however, that Mr. Conrad has hidden away a name which, if he used it, would leave no doubt as to his nationality. Should he use his full baptismal title, it would be Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski. Mr. Conrad, when he was a sailor on an English merchantman, found his messmates incapable of handling his jaw-breaking cognomen, and therefore dropped it-so English literary people are spared another name to add to the list of impossible ones, which already includes Sienkiewicz, Tourgenieff, Dostoievski, etc.

A MEMORIAL OF JACOB ABBOTT

(We call attention to the following circular, issued with the hope of interesting all who knew Jacob Abbott, and those to whom the Rollo Books were the dear delight of childhood.)

IN 1839, Jacob Abbott, then pastor of the Eliot Church at Roxbury, Massachusetts, and coming into notice as an author of books for the young, removed to Farmington, Maine, there the better to carry on the literary work which Providence seemed to be laying upon him. In the outskirts of the village, directly opposite his father's modest home, he bought four acres of wild land and laid them out as "Little Blue." Here he lived writing till 1843, when the death of his wife broke up his home, and he went to New York to join his brothers in the conduct of "Abbott's Institution for Young Ladies." About 1870, Mr. Jacob Abbott returned to Farmington to spend his closing years, making his home with his two sisters at what had been his father's home, across the road from "Little Blue," and known as "Fewacres." Here many of his later books were written. Here he lived from 1870. Here, in 1879, in the office," as his room, which had been his father's before him, was called, he died.

66

For nearly twenty years "Fewacres" has been in the

hands of strangers. A movement has now been started in Farmington to recover it, to restore it as nearly as possible to its condition when Jacob Abbott occupied it, and to preserve it as his memorial. Temporary financial arrangements have been made, and as soon as the purchase money, $1,850, can be raised, the property will be deeded to trustees to hold and administer for the purpose stated. The features of the rambling old cottage and the shady grounds especially associated with Jacob Abbott will be carefully protected, and it is believed that the property as a whole can be advantageously and fittingly used in some working connection with the Abbott School" directly across the road, which in its origin, history, name, and association is itself a striking and significant memorial of the author of the "Rollo books and "The Young Christian." The details of this trust will be carefully shaped so as to serve the purpose of the memorial and protect the interest of subscribers to the fund.

It is hoped that this circular will reach some surviving pupils of Jacob Abbott in the Boston and New York schools, and many and grateful readers of his books all over the world, who will be glad to aid in carrying out this plan. Contributions of $1.00 by mail will be gratefully received by either of the undersigned, with as much more as any one chooses to give. Prompt acknowledgment will be made to the subscribers.

CARLETON P. MERRILL,
GEORGE DUDLEY CHURCH,
Farmington, Maine.

Correspondence with Mr. Brown

MR. BROWN has received the following communication from New York, inclosing this question from our August number: "The scientific accuracy of the anti-vivisectionist' is seldom very obtrusive, but has any one ever surpassed the recent utterance of Archdeacon Wilberforce, who invoked part of his audience at an anti-vivisectionist meeting as You my female brethren '?"

6

"Strikes me he spoke correctly. Brethren' unqualified applies to both sexes together, or to a number of either sex. If one wished to specify the sex of 'brethren,' he would correctly say My male brethren,' or 'My female brethren.' No sex is indicated by the word 'brethren' standing alone. Is not the query stupid?" "W. C. STILES, Standard Dictionary Staff." Mr. Brown, though he has never been on a dictionary staff, can in no way think he was wrong. The question as to whether the query was stupid" or not is not one for him to decide. At any rate, if he were a public speaker he would rather appear stupid than ridiculous; and he cannot help thinking he would be ridiculous if he addressed a body of men as my "male brethren." Nor does he find his correspondent's use upheld in any dictionary, either by word or example.

Also we received this letter:

EDWARD ABBOTT,
II Dana Street,

DOES not the den of Mr. Irving Bacheller, photographs of which are now wide-spread, exactly coincide with the idea of the sort of thing that the author of Eben Holden" would build and call a den"? Can one help wondering if the interior of the " squat tower" is furnished with Japanese fans as a "Turkish cosy-corner"? A "literary note tells me that "Mr Bacheller recently remarked that in preparation for this novel” [“ Vergilius"] "he had read over one hundred volumes." Is this many or few?

SPEAKING of consistency, does not the portrait of Thomas W. Lawson of Boston," on the cover of the September Everybody's, exactly and delightfully fulfil a preconceived idea of the appearance of the strenuous author of "Frenzied Finance"?

MILK and Degeneracy; Why Infants Die." This is the key-note of the discussions which are now rampant in the newspapers in London's "silly season" of 1904. There is no literary gossip about; authors are all either holiday-making or haymaking, which in this case means the seeking out of new varieties of local color.

The most notable and significant fact with regard to summer books is, that among the announcements of two of London's leading publishers, which fill the front advertising page of a certain "literary, political, and economic" weekly journal, the larger proportion of titles are announced as by American authors.

The skill of the American novelist appears to be above and beyond reach of competition, certainly the repute into which the work of such well-known Americans as Mrs. Wiggin, Henry Harland, Winston Churchill, and Charles G. D. Roberts, to mention but a quartette of those whose