"Editor St. Nicholas League: I find the pages of your department the most discouraging reading, and I read them with despairing fascination every month. I cannot help drawing a parallel of my own work with that of your young people, who are successively getting on the rolls of honor, getting their writings printed, and winning the silver and gold badge and the cash prize.

"I sympathize with them, for I remember when my first story was accepted by a first-class magazine, and when the editor asked for and accepted more of them-my own silver and gold badge winnings; the publishing of my novel was my cash prize in real-life literary competition. When my name was included in 'Who 's Who in America,' and a London publisher brought out my novel, was I not an honor member of the literary

craft?

"But I was nearly forty years old when my own silver badge was won; and I was forty-five years of age before I became an honor member in the literary world. After all the long drudgery and hard work implied in this, I see boys and girls-and chiefly girls,, mind you!-aged fourteen or sixteen doing literary work in your

League pages which I can never hope to equal! If you continue much longer to educate and train writers of such tender years and such great ability, what is to become of my generation of literary workers? When these young people who excel us older folk have had a few years' more training, they will outrank us completely, and our occupation will be gone. So I am discouraged to the depths of despair; but I am glad in my heart, because I cannot help rejoicing at the wonderful achievement of youth in the St. Nicholas League. After all, I am glad, although I. may be reduced by this new competition to writing only, 'Entirely original and age correct,' on the manuscript of my child."

The Century Co. is actively engaged on a plan greatly to widen the influence of ST. NICHOLAS, which to-day has more readers than at any other time since its foundation in 1873.

"THE CAPACITIES OF A CHILD'S MIND" Of "The Bible for Young People"-no -now published in an illustrated edition, at $1.50, and used in a number of private schools-the late Bishop Henry C. Potter said:

"This volume has a distinct value and vocation. Not all of the Bible is of equal worth or pertinency; not all of it is of equal interest and utility. The old tradition that to read it through, mechanically and undiscriminately, two or three times a year, had of itself some occult and mysterious potency, has come to be recognized as belonging to the kindred tradition that soldiers' lives have been saved by a New Testament carried in the left breast pocket, because it was a Testament; whereas any other volume carried in the same place would have stopped a bullet quite as effectually. But all the while the living, spiritual, quickening force of the literature has endured, and will endure, because it is, in every higher note of it, the voice of the Divine. .

"To gather, therefore, within the covers of one volume that which rings through and through with this higher note; and especially, by arrangement, by selection, by reverent and discriminating methods of sequence, to put together what will make a Child's Bible-this, it ought to be plain to a just mind, is a worthy and timely thing to do. It is not my office to pronounce judgment here as to the skill and fitness with which, in this volume, the task has been performed; but I venture to think that those who examine it, from whatever standpoint, will recognize that the qualities that, for such a task, are most of all demanded-a reverent handling, a fine insight, a tender perception of the wants and capacities of a child's mind-have not been wanting, and that it will be widely welcomed as a good work done in a good way."

A NEW AMERICAN HISTORY While Dr. S. E. Forman's "Advanced American History," just issued by The Century Co., is intended mainly for the use of students in high schools, normal schools, and academies, it is a book of much interest and value for the general reader. Special attention is given to economic and social subjects and to the industrial and political history of recent times, and the presentation of the Westward Movement is unusually full and vivid.