rful Yellow Girl, the
pretty advance-guard of _To-Day_? But I suppose the honour of the
discovery of the colour for advertising purposes rests with Mr. Colman;
though its recent boom comes from the publishers, and particularly from
the Bodley Head. _The Yellow Book_ with any other colour would hardly
have sold as well--the first private edition of Mr. Arthur Benson's
poems, by the way, came caparisoned in yellow, and with the identical
name, _Le Cahier Jaune_; and no doubt it was largely its title that made
the success of _The Yellow Aster_. In literature, indeed, yellow has
long been the colour of romance. The word 'yellow-back' witnesses its
close association with fiction; and in France, as we know, it is the
all but universal custom to bind books in yellow paper. Mr. Heinemann
and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still
hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and
that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed
the fashion with his _Yellow Fairy Book_; and, indeed, one of the best
known figures in fairydom is yellow--namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow,
always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar
significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high
Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow
Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!--and the Yellow Fever, like
'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The
same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea.

Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important
and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green, no doubt,
contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world.
'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet--

'... 'Tis the life of heaven--the domain
Of Cynthia--the wide palace of the sun--
The tent of Hesperus, and all his train--
The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun.
Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ...
Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.'

Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on _The
Colour Sense_, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly
poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue
only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and eve