The difficulties of choosing stories of modern child-life for teaching in school are serious. They are most likely to be thin in material, flimsy in structure, trivial in style, sentimental in atmosphere, so that they fall to pieces under the test of study in a class of acute and questioning children. It is best not to choose any long book of this sort. For the younger children use the shorter bits of story, such as may be found in Laura Richards' _Five Minute Stories_, or such as any teacher may collect for herself from many sources; occasionally one may find a perfect specimen in one of the children's periodicals, and there is now a wealth of such things in verse. We must be wary of those books about children, interpretative of children, of which our own day has produced so many charming specimens, whose appeal is entirely to adults. Such are Pater's _The Child in the House_, and Kenneth Graham's _The Golden Age_. Part of _A Child's Garden of Verses_ is of this kind. Of this sort, too, is the pretty little _Emmy Lou_, an interpretation of a child's consciousness, not a children's story. The general question of the reading of juveniles will be left for a chapter of miscellanies farther on. It is not possible to make any long book about children the center of a class's work. Such material is best used as a sort of reserve, a recreation from time to time, and is best given in short stories that can be read at intervals; or if it be a long story, one that can be distributed among the other reading. It is true of this kind of story too, that the best results come of using material not made especially for children, but which appeals to children, however, because it appeals to universal and elemental human nature. Among the folk-tales are many of the realistic type that are most serviceable. Like the folk fairy-tales they have that mysteriously but truly universal appeal, which makes them childlike, though originally they were not made for children. They are those comic and realistic tales which may originally have been coarse, but which have been refined by years and winnowed by use until they have taken on a form and value like those of some piece of ancient peasant hand-work--they are simple, genuine, homely art. Such are _Kluge Else_, _Hans in Luck_, _Great Claus and Little Claus_, _The Three Sillies_ and all the delightful company of noodles, and the great family of plain folks with their homely affairs.