Will a boy read "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"? Should a boy read "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"? Yes and yes! Any boy who cannot enjoy the most delightful fooling that was ever put into a book deserves the greatest of sympathy. He is certainly full of unmannerly sadness in his youth. Where else was there ever such clever and curious nonsense? What mathematician other than Dodgson ever put before boys and girls such enduring work? It is a case where two and two does not always make four, but it does always make the pleasing thing. Much that goes as serious literature is not half so wise as is the playfulness of this book, nor is it so worthy of being thoroughly known and appreciated. Of course there are a few perpendicular people who see not that it has abiding charms. They cannot double or shake to the mood of its nonsense--nor do they find it grow "curiouser and curiouser" with each reading. Yet it is a classic for children, and it is going to endure. As a general rule, books for children are cast in a rather serious mood. This is true of the myth and the romantic fairy tale. But the element of humour creeps into the English and the German household tales, for humour is necessary to all earnest living. How far this sense of humour is to be developed is a question hard to answer. This much is true, however: in mature years and under the full responsibility of life, a keen sense of humour is about the only thing that will save a man from himself at times, preserve his balance when he is nearing the borderland of tragedy. Now what is to be the nature of this humour? Is it to be the insipid burlesque that finds its pleasure in the medical almanac and the comic supplement? Or is it to be the kind that wears the sock with brains and taste, the kind that Touchstone has? The latter is the one that sparkles and is worth while. It is the kind that the child starts with in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "The Rose and the Ring." It is the product of men who possess qualities of mind and heart such as Thackeray did. How Shakespeare must have doted on his jesters! And what musical nonsense refrains he wrote.