I know of one evanescently popular young creature who chronically contributes to the magazines, whose mother it is said, writes his tales which, she being a clever woman and he an uncommonly stupid man, appears credible to say the least; and there is another “man” I am told of whose sister is said to write his poems and modestly efface herself, and as the stories are good and the poems fairly readable, it should be the part of THE PHILISTINE to disclose to the world the real authors and chastise these and other shams, for shams are the hardest hurdles in the steeplechase which Truth has to make in this world, since they substitute the false for the real and crown the fool with the laurels of the genius. How much more might be said of the tasks you have to accomplish, brave PHILISTINE with your brawny arm and your good naked sword! So much that the very thought of it fatigues one and that, hailing you as the latest and best contestant in the tourney of Knighthood and yet, considering you as a publication in an embryonic stage, I am compelled to quote these lovely lines of Longfellow: “Oh, little feet that such long years Must wander through this vale of tears, I, nearer to the wayside inn Where travail ends and rest begins, Grow weary thinking of your road.” MARK S. HUBBELL. SIDE TALKS WITH THE PHILISTINES: BEING SUNDRY BITS OF WISDOM WHICH HAVE BEEN HERETOFORE SECRETED, AND ARE NOW SET FORTH IN PRINT. It is a land of free speech, Philistia, and if one of us chooses to make remarks concerning the work of the others no sense of modesty keeps us quiet. It is because we cannot say what we would in the periodicals which are now issued in a dignified, manner in various places, that we have made this book. In the afore-mentioned periodicals divers men chatter with great fluency, startling regularity and “damnable complacency,” each through his individual bonnet. Edward W. Bok, evidently assisted by Mrs. Lydia Pinkham and W. L. Douglas, of Brocton, Massachusetts, prints the innermost secrets of dead women told by their living male relatives for six dollars a column. Thereby the authors are furnished with the price of a week’s board, and those of us who may have left some little sense of decency, wonder what manner of man it may be who sells his wife’s heart to the readers of Bok. But the “unspeakable Bok” is “successful.” His magazine flourishes like a green bay tree. Many readers write him upon subjects of deportment and other matters in which he is accomplished. So, the gods give us joy! Let him drive on, and may his _Home Journal_ have five million readers before the year is out—God help them! Mr. Gilder dishes up monthly beautifully printed articles which nobody cares about, but which everybody buys, because _The Century_ looks well on the library table.