Lord Brougham relates that one of his friends, a professor in a university, consulted one of the ablest historians of his time as to what would be the best discipline for acquiring a good narrative style, as a prelude to writing a book of travels through Asia. The advice given him was to read Robinson Crusoe carefully. When the professor expressed astonishment, supposing it to be a jest, the historian said he was quite serious, but that if Robinson Crusoe would not help him, for any reason, he recommended Gulliver's Travels. The late Donald G. Mitchell once said: "If you should ever have any story of your own to tell, and want to tell it well, I advise you to take Robinson Crusoe for a model!" Parents and teachers who do not read aloud to young children, or who do not practise telling stories to children, probably do not realize what simple but extraordinarily valuable opportunities for self-education they are ignoring, to say nothing of the help they can be to children. In order to be successful we have to try and put ourselves in the child's place. The average reader does not concentrate sufficiently to get the thought clearly from the text, and does not imagine himself to be actually in the midst of the scene he is describing. The consequence is that his voice and actions are not, except perhaps in a slight degree, affected by the emotions he is supposed to be experiencing. Dramatic rendering of dramatic passages is worth striving for, and should be encouraged on the part of children. The story-teller who roars with the lion and bleats with the lamb is sure to be rewarded with shouts of enthusiastic delight from the audience. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS _All nations have their fairy tales, but India seems to have been the country from which they all started, carried on their travels by the professional story-tellers who kept the tales alive throughout Asia. In Bagdad and Cairo to-day, that cafe never lacks customers where the blind storyteller relates to the spell-bound Arabs some chapter from the immortal Arabian Nights, the King of all Wonder Books. No one knows where the tales were written, except that they came out of the Far East, India, Arabia and Persia. Haroun Al Raschid, who was called The Just, was a real Eastern monarch who lived in Bagdad over eleven hundred years ago, about the same time that Charlemagne was King of France. We can believe that the tales are very old, but the most we know is that they were translated from Arabic into French in 1704-17 by a Frenchman named Galland, and that the manuscript of his translation is preserved in the French National Library. American boys first had the chance to read the notes in English about the time President Monroe was elected._ ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES