bat, but this statement has been cruelly discredited by
the artist who illustrated the book, and who placed the gentleman in an
attitude (or 'stance,' as they say now), and gave him a grip on the
handle, from which nothing but ridicule and disaster could result. Mr.
Bedford is not like this. Mr. Bedford is one of those rare artists who
read a story first.

Of 'Waste Not, Want Not' it is unnecessary to speak. It is one of the
best of the stories in Miss Edgeworth's _Parent's Assistant_, most
entertaining of books with dull names. I have my doubts as to whether
Benjamin was not too much encouraged above Hal, but that has nothing to
do with the story.

We come now to comedy and to farce. 'The Fugitive' I found in an odd
little book by a Miss Pearson called _A Few Weeks at Clairmont Castle_,
1828; while 'The Butcher's Tournament' is from Peter Parley. I read this
story when I was quite a child, and it always remained in my memory, and
for several years of late I have kept up a desultory search for it. I
could not, therefore, having chanced upon it in _Peter Parley's Annual_
for 1843, omit it from this volume. The author's name is not given, but
I suppose that William Martin wrote it--under the influence of Douglas
Jerrold, I should say.

For 'Malleville's Night of Adventure' I have gone again to Jacob Abbott,
from whom last year I took 'Embellishment.' The story is a chapter or
two of _Beechnut_, best of the Franconia books. Later the author changed
the name Malleville, which certainly is not beautiful, to Madeline; but
I have left it here as in the original edition. There seems to be no
middle way with Jacob Abbott: you must either think him the flattest of
writers for children, or the most interesting. So many of my earliest
recollections are bound up with Phonny and Beechnut that I shall always
think of Jacob Abbott with enthusiasm. But the heretics in this matter I
can understand, although pitying them too.

For looking through the scores and scores--I might, I believe, say
hundreds--of books from which to select the twenty stories within these
covers, I should consider myself amply rewarded by the discovery of
_Lady Anne_. This story--I might almost say this novel--which is at
once the longest and, to my mind, the best thing in the present volume,
is anonymous. All that I know of the author is that she--I take it to be
a woman's work--wrote also _The Blue Silk Hand-bag_, but of that book I
have been able to catch