We feel justified in being guided by several successful experiments we have made with our fiction. We persuaded Mr. Freeman Tilden, who is a farmer himself and thoroughly familiar with all phases of agriculture, to create a character in Old Man Crabtree who might be defined as “a Wallingford baiter.” Mr. Crabtree is a shrewd retired country banker. His experience had taught him all the tricks of “high finance” and he was always on the lookout for the specialists in shoddy and sham when they came to town. In the climax the skinners were invariably neatly flayed by Old Man Crabtree. These stories of Mr. Tilden were real and drew in a continuous flow of favorable comment. Zane Grey has always been able to strike a responsive chord with the lovers of outdoor life, of whom the American farmer is undoubtedly in the majority. They like his descriptions of the frontier as it was in the 70’s and they seem to be keen for his vigorous characters, notwithstanding how strenuous. We like good dog stories of the sort Albert Payson Terhune has been writing for us. And we like small town stories when they are as good as those Tom P. Morgan is writing; but then, Tom Morgan lived these stories for fifty years before he began to write them. The great majority of our contributors have specialized in some agricultural pursuit. Many of them are living on their farms and conducting them as successful business enterprises. We number among our most valued contributors the heads of leading agricultural colleges, federal and state government experts, graduates of agricultural colleges who are now devoting all their time to writing, county agricultural agents, engineers who are specializing in agricultural mechanics and so on. Among them are such well-known men as Eugene Davenport, Dean of the Illinois College of Agriculture, Herbert Quick, until recently a member of the Federal Farm Loan Board, Frank A. Waugh, Professor of Horticulture, Massachusetts College of Agriculture, E. V. Wilcox and J. Sidney Cates, for many years employed as farm management experts by the United States Department of Agriculture, and P. S. Lovejoy, Professor of Forestry, University of Michigan. Such writers as I have described above supply the bulk of the contents of _The Country Gentleman_ and consequently to preserve a balanced ration, as a livestock feeder would say, we try our utmost to obtain the sort of fiction that will round out the ensemble. BARTON W. CURRIE. _The Country Gentleman._ CURTIS PUBLISHING CO., Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa. THE DELINEATOR We _Delineator_ editors think that we know a good story when we see it; _vide_ the magazine. Yet no issue of the magazine, and perhaps no six issues, contain all the types of good stories that we like.