In stories of home life Miss Alcott still easily takes the lead, with Susan Coolidge and Sophie May following in merit and popularity. The boys have an excellent story of home life in Rossiter Johnson's "Phaeton Rogers." The setting is perfectly simple, every day surroundings, but the characters have the abounding vitality that keeps things moving. The entertaining succession of events proceeds directly and naturally from the ingenuity and healthy activity of the young people grouped together. The book is a model in this respect as well as in the use of colloquial English which never loses a certain refinement. Every boy, while reading "Phaeton Rogers," finds himself in touch with good companions--and this is true as well, in Charles Talbot's books for boys and girls. The most important books for boys are the historical stories, appealing at once to the hero worship and the love of adventure common to boyhood; at the same time they should give a good general idea of history. The story in historical setting is, also, most desirable for girls--in that it balances the too subjective tendency; it carries the mind of the reader beyond the emotional condition of the heroine--indeed the heroine has no time to study her own emotions when brought into vital relation with stirring events. Apart from the value of the historical facts imparted is the indirect but more valuable habit of mind cultivated in the girl reader. Vivid, stirring, absorbing stories for girls can be and should be written in this field, which is practically unlimited. Miss Yonge has done some good service here. "The prince and the pauper" and the "Last days of Pompeii" are also illustrations of the kind of work that should be done--they are both strong in the direct interrelation between the imaginary characters and real history--and both appeal alike to the boy and the girl. Books written with a direct moral purpose seldom achieve popularity with boys--and yet one of the most popular of all their books is "Captains courageous," which is of the highest moral value though without one line of religious preaching in its pages. Here the boys are in touch with a real, living character, acted upon and developed, through the moulding pressure of life itself--from first to last the aim of the story is the boy; and yet the moral outcome is simple, natural, inevitable and manly; it appeals to the common sense which is strong in boys. Now when a woman writes for girls on the subject of the transformation of a frivolous butterfly into a girl of sense, instead of giving us character and action with a moral outcome, we have a religious setting with the action of the story and the conduct of the characters bent in every direction to illustrate the motive of the story--the religious idea.