It is refreshing to find that the Christmas idea of making others happy has at last reached our Sunday-schools. For years teachers and parents have made annually an exhaustive effort to feast their schools on Christmas day. However great their efforts the results could never be entirely satisfactory. Somebody was unavoidably overlooked, and the managers were always too nearly worn out to enjoy the holiday. A new plan, we hope, is to be instituted. Last season many schools tried it, more are making the experiment this year. It is to substitute giving by the school. On Christmas eve the classes bring in offerings for the poor. Whatever they wish and their purses allow is offered. The plan meets with the heartiest reception wherever proposed, the smallest children often being the most eager to give. A general adoption of this method of celebrating Christmas would do much to counteract the selfish feeling so often found in Sunday-schools that gifts, entertainments and prizes must be continually given in order to keep the school together. * * * * * Edward Everett Hale has consented that his name be added to the list of the counselors of the C. L. S. C. This announcement will be received with genuine satisfaction by every one interested in our work. It is an honor to us to number such a man in our faculty. Mr. Hale’s position in the religious and literary world is well established. Last spring when _The Critic and Good Literature_ asked the public to cast a vote for the forty native American authors whom it deemed most worthy to form the “forty immortals” of a proposed American Academy, his name was the eleventh on the list, which ran: Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Bancroft, Howells, Curtis, Aldrich, Harte, Stedman, White and Hale. His books are known most widely; his sympathies are broad and wise; he is a man of the truest culture of both mind and heart. He will be welcomed most warmly by Chautauquans as one of their honored counselors. * * * * * Mr. Richard Grant White, whose articles on English form so important and interesting a part of this year’s course of reading, has been for several weeks seriously ill; so ill, indeed, that he has been quite unable to prepare his article for the present issue of THE CHAUTAUQUAN. By another month, however, Mr. White writes us that he believes his health will be so improved that he can continue his work. * * * * *