to the brave brotherhood of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, they have a community of sympathy which brings them very close together. It is seldom and indeed almost never that the short story gives to the reader this sense of knowing familiarly its characters. If there be a series, as in Kipling's "Jungle Book" or Maclaren's tales, where the same actors appear again and again, of course the effect may be in this respect the same as that of a novel; but cases of this sort are not common. All the aged women of Miss Wilkins' stories, for instance, are apt in the memory either to blend into one composite photograph of the New England old woman, or to stand remotely, not as persons that we know, but rather as types about which we know. The genuine novel-reader will realize that this consideration is really one of no inconsiderable weight; and it is one which becomes more and more pressing with the increase of the influence of the short story. This consideration is the more important from the fact that novels in which the reader is able to identify himself with the characters are by far the most effective, because thus is he removed from the realities which surround him, and for the time being freed from whatever would hamper his imagination. That which in real life he would be, but may not, he may in fiction blissfully and expandingly realize. The innate sense of justice--not, perhaps, unseconded by the innate vanity; we are all of us human!--demands that human possibilities shall be realized, and in the story in which the reader merges his personality in that of some actor, all this is accomplished. In actual outward experience life justifies itself but rarely; to most men its justification is reached only by the aid of the imagination, and it is largely by the aid of literature that the imagination works. Even more true is this of the other sex. Much that men learn from life women must learn from books; so that to women fiction is the primer of life as well as the text-book of the imagination. By the novels he reads the man gives evidence of his imaginative development; the woman of her intellectual existence.