Now it so happens that the people who made the book are also publishers of guide-books and among these of a guide-book to Mexico, _eo nomine_, it had been fitter and more worthy their own high standing had they not stooped to palm off such a farrago upon a man whose thoughts at the time were not how to get to Mexico nor what could be seen if he went there, but simply the means of beguiling an evening, lolling at ease in his smoking jacket. As to the lady who was once equal to writing _The Land of the Sky_, one feels sorrow at her fall, and cannot help wondering if sin of this sort yields her either profit or pleasure. 2. If a reader were asked to single out some one publisher whose name should be guarantee that in buying a book one would get fair equivalent for his money, not in paper and ink alone, but in the stuff of its ideas, he would not often go amiss were he to name Macmillans. It is with double pain therefore that he resents being led astray into paying Two Dollars for such a trifling effusion as _Love in Idleness_. He is hurt not only by the one and one-half dollars lost in excess of any just valuation of the book, but also and perhaps by a less reparable loss of the confidence long deserved by the class of Macmillan publications. In short he feels that both publisher and writer have conspired to cinch him and the rest of the reading public, and here, too, the heavier share of the reproach must fall upon the man. If Mr. Marion Crawford, pluming himself upon such past achievements as _Mr. Isaacs_, chooses to value the weakling of his decadence at such extravagant figures that it must be listed at Two Dollars if it is to appear in decent type, there is surely no need that his accomplice be Macmillan. Doubtless there be publishers whose horns would be exalted were Crawford’s name to shine upon their title pages, but Macmillan is not of such cattle; he stands among the very topmost already, wherefore he should be above impostures. The book is freely illustrated, but the pictures have nothing to do with the persons and incidents of the story. 3. As the editor of the Only Real Sure-Enough _Chip-Munk_ so truthfully points out in his every issue, man is an imitative animal. But whether it is equally true that there are hundreds and hundreds of imitation chip-munks, all made like those calico cats that do duty as bric-a-brac, I cannot say. Yet the undisputed statement, made in such a solemn way, that man is imitative, must stand. On ascending a certain beautiful little bay along the coast of Maine, the traveller is confronted by the startling legend, painted on the face of a great palisade: _This is Belfast, the Home of Gringo’s Vermifuge—One Hundred Doses for One Dollar_.