must have, whether he finds it in the tinsel setting of Oliver Optic or the refined gold of Robert Louis Stevenson. And the magnet in the nature of the girl draws to herself something helpful even from Martha Finley; otherwise, she would not speak of the "Elsie" books as "beautiful": there is something in them which to her represents "beauty." Nevertheless, while justly condemning the Oliver Optic and the Elsie books as cheap, tawdry things, the librarian must seek among better authors the holding quality on the nature of the child which these books possess. She must search for books in which these elements of interest are incarnated in what we call literature--books which, while rivalling these in attraction, will at the same time refine and broaden the taste of the reader. Now, the lovers of Oliver Optic and Mrs. Finley do not take kindly to the classics and as, in the modern stories for young people, few will pass muster as literature, all that the librarian of to-day can do is to use her judgment and discrimination among those the writers have provided. The boys are readily turned from Oliver Optic to Henty, Tomlinson, Jules Verne, and on to "Ivanhoe," but with the girls the case is hard. The girl tells us that she likes stories about boarding-school. It is a capital subject: in the hands of a writer sympathetic with girls, of fertile imagination and vigorous power of characterization, boarding-school life affords material for most entertaining combinations--but the literature of the boarding-school has yet to be written. The average boarding-school story has three main characters--the attractive, impulsive heroine, always getting into trouble; the cruel, cold-blooded, unscrupulous rival, habitually dealing in falsehood, and the teacher who is singularly devoid of discernment or intuition. The heroine inevitably falls into the snare of the rival, and things are usually set right all around by a death-bed scene--although actual death is sometimes averted. "Louie's last term at St. Mary's" is one of the better stories of this kind, and Mrs. Spofford's "Hester Stanley at St. Mark's" is fairly well written, with a touch of the charm of the author's personality. "Chums," by Maria Louise Pool, is one of the worst of its kind, where envy, hatred, and malice run riot through the pages and the actors in the story are wholly lacking in vitality. The experiences of Miss Phelps's "Gypsy Breynton" and Susan Coolidge's "Katy" are as satisfactory pictures of boarding school life as we have; and Helen Dawes Brown's "Two college girls" is a good story. "Brenda, her school and her club," by Helen L. Reed, is a recent valuable addition to books for girls.