On the 2d of March, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, hardly more than a fortnight after his golden-wedding anniversary, Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin passed away. He died suddenly, and so escaped the pain and weariness of lingering illness. Some readers of the ROUND TABLE who were in the great throng of young people in the New York Building at the World's Fair, when we kept our first reunion in the beautiful White City, no doubt remember Mr. Coffin as one of the speakers on that happy occasion. With Kirk Munroe, Charles Dudley Warner, and others, Mr. Coffin was present then, and he said several things which made a deep impression on my mind as I looked over the sea of bright young faces gathered under our starry flag. He told the boys that they owed something to their country, that they must grow up prepared to be her lovers and defenders, to stand up for her through all things, and to be good true citizens, and Americans who cared for America wherever they might go. What Mr. Coffin said that day with his voice so eloquently he had been saying in print for many years. He wrote nineteen books, all of them the gift of a fine mind and true heart, to the boys and girls of America. The names of these books are familiar to you, and the very titles are attractive, as, for example, _My Days and Nights on the Battle-field_, _Following the Flag_, _Winning his Way_, _The Boys of '76_, _Our New Way 'Round the World_, and similar stirring and suggestive names. Among Mr. Coffin's delightfully exciting volumes, I am very fond of _The Story of Liberty_, a book which carries us back to old England, and shows us the cradle of our American freedom in the mother-land. Mr. Coffin had the rare art of standing outside his story and letting it tell itself. He marshalled its incidents and events with historic accuracy, and so made his narrative always useful and acceptable as supplementary reading to the boy or girl who was studying a period at school, but he also allowed his people to speak and act in a natural way. His books unroll like the panorama at the show, and a very satisfactory panorama they are, ideally painted for the library of young America. Personally Mr. Coffin was full of enthusiasm and enjoyment in his work, and he cared a great deal for his youthful audience. He did not under-rate their intelligence and write down to them. He took it for granted that our young people are intelligent and interested in both work and play, and his books paid them the compliment of dealing with serious themes, though always in a sprightly manner. All his books are so beautifully illustrated that they are really fine picture galleries, in which one sees how people dressed, how buildings and streets looked, and how houses were furnished in the times of which Mr. Coffin wrote.