On what smooth Elysian sward does this little Grecian hare sport with his English cousins? Fed, perchance, by Persephone’s white hand, they gambol for evermore by the deep waters of Oblivion; and the gray ghosts, flitting by, smile with sad eyes upon the nimble creatures who, shadows in shadowland, yet bear in every limb rich memories of woodland glade, and of the dear, life-giving soil of earth. BATTLE OF THE BABIES A warfare has been raging in our midst, the echoes of which have hardly yet died sullenly away upon either side of the Atlantic. It has been a bloodless and un-Homeric strife, not without humorous side-issues, as when Pistol and Bardolph and Fluellen come to cheer our anxious spirits at the siege of Harfleur. Its first guns were heard in New York, where a modest periodical, devoted to the training of parents, opened fire upon those time-honored nursery legends which are presumably dear to the hearts of all rightly constituted babies. The leader of this gallant foray protested vehemently against all fairy tales of a mournful or sanguinary cast, and her denunciation necessarily included many stories which have for generations been familiar to every little child. She rejected _Red Riding Hood_, because her own infancy was haunted and embittered by the evil behavior of the wolf; she would have none of _Bluebeard_, because he was a wholesale fiend and murderer; she would not even allow the pretty _Babes in the Wood_, because they tell a tale of cold-hearted cruelty and of helpless suffering; while all fierce narratives of giants and ogres and magicians were to be banished ruthlessly from our shelves. Verily, reading will be but gentle sport in the virtuous days to come.