I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven who had just read "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." He said: "If there are any more books like them in the world, send them to me quick." I had to humbly confess to him that if there were any others I had not the good fortune to know of them. What a red-letter-day it is to a boy, the day he first opens "Tom Sawyer." I would rather sail on the raft down the Missouri again with "Huck" Finn and Jim than go down the Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in May. Certainly Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his Missouri boys than when he makes sickley romances about Joan of Arc. And certainly he never did a better piece of work than "Prince and Pauper." One seems to get at the very heart of old England in that dearest of children's books, and in its pages the frail boy king, and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day wrought so much woe for unhappy England, and the dashing Princess Elizabeth who lived to rule so well, seem to live again. A friend of Mr. Clemens' once told me that he said he wrote that book so that when his little daughters grew up they might know that their tired old jester of a father could be serious and gentle sometimes. _The Home Monthly_, May 1897 _William Dean Howells_ Certainly now in his old age Mr. Howells is selecting queer titles for his books. A while ago we had that feeble tale, "The Coast of Bohemia," and now we have "My Literary Passions." "Passions," literary or otherwise, were never Mr. Howells' forte and surely no man could be further from even the coast of Bohemia.