"The Moon," which--in
defiance of its title--affords some very interesting glimpses of
sublunary home life:--"To look at the white moon shinin threw your
winder at night, sitting on the edge of the bed, and lissin to your
father and mothers knives and forks rattlin on their plates while they
are getting their nice suppers, is the prittist site you ever seed. When
its liver and hunyens there a having, you can smell it all the way
upstairs. It looks very brite and nearly all white. Once when they was a
having fried fish and potaters I crept out of my bed-room to the top of
the stairs all in the dark, just so as to have a better lissen and a
nearer smell. I forget whether there was a moon that night. I don't
think as there was, cose I got to the top of the stares afore I knew I
was there, and I tumbled right down to the bottom of the stares, a
bursting open the door at the bottom, and rolling into the room nearly
as far as the supper table. My father thote of giving me the stick for
it, but he let my mother give me a bit of fish on some bread, and told
me to skittle off to bed again. I am sure there was not no moon, else I
should have seed there wasn't a top stare when I put my foot out so
slow. I only skratted my left eye and ear a bit with that last bump at
the bottom, witch was a hard one, Stares are steeper than girls think,
speshilly where the corner is."

CHILDREN'S STORIES.

The editor of a London literary journal was recently inviting men and
women in prominent positions in public life to name for publication the
books of their childhood. So far as I observed, none of the half-hundred
or more who responded gave _Blue Beard_, _Cinderella_, _Little Red
Riding Hood_, or any of the others in the same category that follow
here. But I am none the less convinced that these old-time favourites,
not yet unknown, though familiar to city children in the present
generation mainly in their variegated and fantastic Christmas pantomime
form, were in Scotland and England alike in the last century more
essentially the books of childhood than any others known and read beyond
the walls of the school-room. The travelling stationers and packmen
carried them in their thousands, in chapbook form, into even the most
remote parts of the country, where they were bartered for and explored
with avidity. In many quarters, indeed, they were so familiar fifty
years ago that the books on occasions could be dispensed with, and the
e