In Mr. James L. Ford’s “Literary Shop” the author reads a severe lesson to the young people who have ambition to write and be printed. They should do newspaper work, he says. The desire for covers and immortality is reprobated. It is to much more that they should know life, and especially the life beyond the confines of the barbed wire fence that shuts out the odorous East side of the metropolis. But Mr. Ford does not tell his young people of a literary shop that stifles more genius than the verse works in Jersey City or the anglomaniac reminiscence mills on Union Square. He has forgotten the metropolitan paper that counts its pages by the ream. What the exclusive clique-ridden magazine discourages by closed doors the Sunday maelstrom swallows alive. The glory of bigness is the destruction of individuality in literary work. The brand of the sweat shop is on all the yawning jaws consume—like the slaver cm the boa’s feast. The successor of the humorist and the domestic poet is the caustic free lance of the little magazines. The reaction is a sequence of the unreasoning greed of the sweat shop. The bibelot is born of the surfeit of the big newspaper. Readers seek it out—stawed with too much for their money. And it is a hopeful sign for individuality in literature that a clean cut idea is valued for a time more than quantity of words on paper, even if the latter have the vanishing magic of a name. Tonnage has had its day in the literature of America. The product of the literary sweat shop is taking its rank with the other things commercially dear to the money changers and despised of all Philistines. WILLIAM MCINTOSH. AN OMINOUS BABY. A baby was wandering in a strange country. He was a tattered child with a frowsled wealth of yellow hair. His dress, of a checked stuff, was soiled and showed the marks of many conflicts, like the chain-shirt of a warrior. His suntanned knees shone above wrinkled stockings which he pulled up occasionally with an impatient movement when they entangled his feet. From a gaping shoe there appeared an array of tiny toes. He was toddling along an avenue between rows of stolid, brown houses. He went slowly, with a look of absorbed interest on his small, flushed face. His blue eyes stared curiously. Carriages went with a musical rumble over the smooth asphalt. A man with a chrysanthemum was going up steps. Two nursery maids chatted as they walked slowly, while their charges hobnobbed amiably between perambulators. A truck wagon roared thunderously in the distance.