Let the school of home be a good one. Let reading be such as to quicken the mind for better reading still; for the school at home is progressive.

The baby is to be read to. What shall mother and sister and father and brother read to the baby?

Babyland. Babyland rhymes and jingles; great big letters and little thoughts and words out of Babyland. Pictures so easy to understand that baby quickly learns the meaning of light and shade, of distance, of tree, of cloud. The grass is green; the sky is blue; the flowers—are they red or yellow? That depends on mother’s house-plants. Baby sees in the picture what she sees in the home and out of the window.

Babyland, mother’s monthly picture-and-jingle primer for baby’s diversion, and baby’s mother-help; 50 cents a year.

What, when baby begins to read for herself? Our Little Men and Women is made to go on with. Babyland forms the reading habit. Think of a baby with the reading habit! After a little she picks up the letters and wants to know what they mean. The jingles are jingles still; but the tales that lie under the jingles begin to ask questions.

What do Jack and Jill go up the hill after water for? Isn’t water down hill? Baby is outgrowing Babyland.

No more nonsense. There is fun enough in sense. The world is full of interesting things; and, if they come to a growing child not in discouraging tangles but an easy one at a time, there is fun enough in getting hold of them. That is the way to grow. Our Little Men and Women helps such growth as that. Beginnings of things made easy by words and pictures; not too easy. The reading habit has got to another stage.

A dollar for such a school as that for a year.

Then comes The Pansy with stories of child-life, travel at home and abroad, adventure, history old and new, religion at home and over the seas, and roundabout tales on the International Sunday School Lesson.

Pansy the editor; The Pansy the magazine. There are thousands and thousands of children and children of larger growth all over the country who know about Pansy the writer, and The Pansy the magazine. There are thousands and thousands more who will be glad to know.

A dollar a year for The Pansy.

The reading habit is now pretty well established; not only the reading habit, but liking for useful reading; and useful reading leads to learning.

Now comes Wide Awake, vigorous, hearty, not to say heavy. No, it isn’t heavy, though full as it can be of practical help along the road to sober manhood and womanhood. Full as it can be! There is need of play as well as of work; and Wide Awake has its mixture of work and rest and play. The work is all toward self-improvement; so is the rest; and so is the play. $2.40 a year.

Specimen copies of all the Lothrop magazines for fifteen cents; any one for five—in postage stamps.

Address D. Lothrop Company, Boston.

You little know what help there is in books for the average housewife.

Take Domestic Problems, for instance, beginning with this hard question: “How may a woman enjoy the delights of culture and at the same time fulfil her duties to family and household?” The second chapter quotes from somebody else: “It can’t be done. I’ve tried it; but, as things now are, it can’t be done.”

Mrs. Diaz looks below the surface. Want of preparation and culture, she says, is at the bottom of a woman’s failure, just as it is of a man’s.

The proper training of children, for instance, can’t be done without some comprehension of children themselves, of what they ought to grow to, their stages, the means of their guidance, the laws of their health, and manners. But mothers get no hint of most of these things until they have to blunder through them. Why not? Isn’t the training of children woman’s mission? Yes, in print, but not in practice. What is her mission in practice? Cooking and sewing!

Woman’s worst failure then is due to the stupid blunder of putting comparatively trivial things before the most important of all. The result is bad children and waste of a generation or two—all for putting cooking and sewing before the training of children.

Now will any one venture to say that any particular mother, you for instance, has got to put cooking and sewing before the training of children?

Any mother who really makes up her mind to put her children first can find out how to grow tolerable children at least.

And that is what Mrs. Diaz means by preparation—a little knowledge beforehand—the little that leads to more.

It can be done; and you can do it! Will you? It’s a matter of choice; and you are the chooser.

We have touched on only one subject. The author treats of many.

Dr. Buckley the brilliant and versatile editor of the Christian Advocate says in the preface of his book on northern Europe “I hope to impart to such as have never seen those countries as clear a view as can be obtained from reading” and “My chief reason for traveling in Russia was to study Nihilism and kindred subjects.”

This affords the best clue to his book to those who know the writer’s quickness, freshness, independence, force, and penetration.

Just short of the luxurious in paper, pictures and print.

The writer best equipped for such a task has put into one illustrated book a brief account of every American voyage for polar exploration, including one to the south almost forgotten.

Not written especially for boys; but they claim it.

The wife of a U. S. lighthouse inspector, Mary Bradford Crowninshield, writes the story of a tour of inspection along the coast of Maine with two boys on board—for other boys of course. A most instructive as well as delightful excursion.

The boys go up the towers and study the lamps and lanterns and all the devices by which a light in the night is made to tell the wary sailor the coast he is on; and so does the reader. Stories of wrecks and rescues beguile the waiting times. There are no waiting times in the story.

There’s a vast amount of coast-lore besides.

Mr. Grant Allen, who knows almost as much as anybody, has been making a book of twenty-eight separate parts, and says of it: “These little essays are mostly endeavors to put some of the latest results of science in simple, clear and intelligible language.”

Now that is exactly what nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand of us want, if it isn’t dry. And it isn’t dry. Few of those who have the wonderful knowledge of what is going on in the learned world have the gift of popular explanation—the gift of telling of it. Mr. Allen has that gift; the knowledge, the teaching grace, the popular faculty.

By no means a list of new-found facts; but the bearings of them on common subjects.

We don’t go on talking as if the earth were the centre of things, as if Galileo never lived. Huxley and Spencer have got to be heard. Shall we wait two hundred and fifty years?

The book is simply an easy means of intelligence.

There is nothing more dreary than chemistry taught as it used to be taught to beginners. There is nothing brighter and fuller of keen delight than chemistry taught as it can be taught to little children even.

“I’ll be their teacher—give them private scientific lectures! Trust me to manage the school part!” The book is alive with the secrets of things.

It takes a learned man to write an easy book on almost any subject.

Arthur Gilman, of the College for Women, at Cambridge, known as the “Harvard Annex,” has made a little book to help young people along in the use of the dictionary. One can devour it in an hour or two; but the reading multiplies knowledge and means of knowledge.

An unconscious beginning of what may grow to be philology, if one’s faculty lies that way. Such bits of education are of vastly more importance than most of us know. They are the seeds of learning.

Elizabeth P. Peabody at the age of eighty-four years has made a book of a number of essays, written during fifty years of a most productive life, on subjects of lasting interest, published forgotten years ago in Emerson’s Magazine, The Dial, Lowell’s Pioneer, etc.

The wife of FrÉmont, the Pathfinder of forty years ago and almost President thirty years ago, has written a bookful of reminiscences.

Mrs. FrÉmont has long been known as a brilliant converser and story-teller. Her later years have been given to making books; and the books have the freshness and sparkle of youth.

The literary editor of the Nation gathers together nearly a hundred poems and parts of poems to read to children going to sleep.

The poems have their various bearings on morals and graces; and there is an index called a key to the moralities. The mother can turn, with little search, to verses that put in a pleasant light the thoughts the little one needs to harbor. Hence the sub-title.

Readers of poetry are almost as scarce as poetry—Have you noticed how little there is in the world? how wide the desert, how few the little oases?

Is it possible? Is there enough sweet singing ringing lustrous verse between heaven and earth to make twelve such books? There is indeed; and heaven and earth are in it!

Ginx’s Baby, a burlesque book of most serious purpose, made a stir in England some years ago; and, what is of more account, went far to accomplish the author’s object.

Dodd is the terrible schoolboy. How he became so; who is responsible; what is the remedy—such is the gist of the book.

As bright as Ginx’s Baby. A bookful of managing wisdom for parents as well as teachers.

Questions such as practical boys and girls are asking their mothers all the year round about things that come up. Not one in ten of the mothers can answer one in ten of the questions.

It is handy to have such a book on the shelf, and handier yet to have the knowledge that’s in it in one’s head.