believed, sometime, peopled the glens of the woodland, slept upon the mosses, and dwelt in the blossoms that you love."

From whatever fountain-head they first sparkled, from the pens of women -the mothers and the sisters-the sweetest and most numerous streams that swell the wide, fair river, have wound down the mountain side and out into the valley Having once aroused to the importance of wholesome writing for youth, dominant with the vigor and freshness of Now and To-Day, one and another woman has said to her heart: "Here is something that I know all about." Pen and paper have been made the allies of woman's new motive and purpose, until the brains that devise for, and the pens that feed, the presses of the great publishing houses, are legion.

In writing this article, it is intended to honor all womanhood. For this purpose the "Six Story-Tellers" have been chosen as representatives of distinct elements and forces among book-makers for the young. Each of the six may be accepted as an exponent of hundreds of fascinating writers, whose brains make pastime and instruction for Prince and Princess America.

The youngest of the "Six Story-Tellers" is Louise Imogen Guiney-a name almost as familiar to the readers of English periodicals as American. Her art is rather the poet's and essayist's than the story-teller's. An only child, her contributions were not inspired by the ever-present demands of small hands clutching at her garments, begging for

stories.

Something in her bright, sweet air of having God's world always about her, tempted the editor of Wide-Awake to say to her, "Write for the children, of

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"What!" said Miss Guiney. "I never believed in fairies, and brownies, and wood-nymphs, and if I dig up their graves in musty old tomes, and prove to the children that they do not exist, and never have, every child who hears my name will detest me."

"Never mind," said the editor, "give us the information in your own way, but give it."

And thus began that unique and individual series of papers, "Fairy Folk All," so quaintly illustrated by Edmund Garrett, which first introduced Miss Guiney to a new field for her pen. I wonder if any one who read them dreamed of the wide research and careful selection necessary for these papers. Over two hundred volumes, in German, Italian, Indo-European and the Arian languages, with those of Provence and Bretagne, a few in the original and many translations, were carefully read for the benefit of the babies.

That this was done (as the young writer laughingly said) "with two hundred maledictions on each child" who was to read them, takes nothing from the value of the results of her research; particularly, when we know that the winsome author has a heart so tender that she would lift a cruising beetle out of her path rather than harm it, while the constant companions of her vigorous walks abroad are four beautiful dogs devoted to their young mistress.

There is a vigor and an out-of-doorness about Miss Guiney's contributions to juvenile literature unlike anything I have met elsewhere. Her "Brownies and Bogles" (by which title these papers appear in book form) peer from the pages, with their native trees swaying above them, and the perfume of their native flowers greets the children as they read. They breathe the same wildwood atmosphere of Miss Guiney's poem "The Wooing Pine":

Dear minions served them in the covert green:
The squirrel coy, the beetle in his mail,
The moth, the bee, the throbbing nightingale
And the gaunt wolf their vassal; to them e'en
The widowed serpent, on her vengeful trail,
Upcast an iridescent eye serene.

Loring Emogen

So, for the children, Louise Imogen Guiney gathered from the legends of every land, brownies and fairy-folk all, "from grove and garden old."

Born in Boston, educated in a convent school in Providence, in a much more scholarly way than is customary for girls, the fine intellectual tastes which Louise Guiney inherited from her father, a brilliant lawyer and a brave soldier, naturally predisposed her to literature as a profession.

A young girl, still in her twenties, the scope of her reading is only less unusual than her memory. At seven years,

she selected Charles Lamb from her father's library as her favorite author, and became so intimate with him, that she says now to read him seems too much like reading herself. Lamb's contemporary, Hazlitt; the poets Drayton, Dr. John Drummond, Sydney, Keats and Shelley are her favorites; while Jeremy Taylor, Thoreau and Robert Louis Stevenson are among the prose authors over whom she grows enthusiastic.

Said I not well, that no gifts or attainments were now too rare to be laid at the feet of the children? Youth is proverbially scornful, yet here is a girl of rare endowments, who, out of the fullness of her young life's ambitions, gives them of her best.

A line from her "Treatise on Plagiarisms," a late sparkling, yet profound, contribution to the older folk, expresses concisely the characteristic quality of her work for the young: "A style of no study, likewise acquired, but acquired as if by sheer healthful exposure to wind and weather."

We touch quite another phase in turning from Miss Guiney's original, but limited writing for the young, to dip into the voluminous works of "Margaret Sidney," whose dearest and almost exclusive audience, is the children. For them she has poured out in story after story. in volume after volume, the abundance of her teeming mental and physical vitality. I know no one among writers,

who carries with her in personal contact, the same healthful equipoise of mind and body so entirely, as does "Margaret Sidney," Mrs. Daniel Lothrop, wife of the Boston publisher.

Her views of life are joyous. The world is a glad world, and the wretchedness and sadness which she may meet, is to her something to be grappled with; to be attacked at its very roots; not something to be contemplated with a lugubrious and impotent shake of the head.

Her first prominent story, which appeared in book form, "Five Little Peppers, and How They Grew," owed its popularity to the very instinct with which, while telling the childish experiences of the "five," she poured sunshine upon the ever recurring problem of the widow, who must live without wealth save in her children.

Mrs. Pepper has a sweet and wholesome nature, alive with all womanly instincts. Many a widowed mother, in following the experiences in the "little brown house," finds her own questions and perplexities simplified, since what happened to the widow Pepper, might happen to any one. Margaret Sidney grew, like Miss Guiney, without immediate association with children. The dear companions of her childhood and youth, also, were the rare volumes of a library gathered through generations of culture. These were her brothers and sisters, and yet, as she drove about the shady streets and environments of New Haven, she drew from these rich resources, as her first contribution to literature-her chosen profession-no scholarly essay, nor ringing epic; but instead, this winning and live narration of the life of the widow Pepper and her children in the "little brown house," with such poems as the "Minute Man," that virile ballad of the "shot heard round the world," and the widely quoted plaint of "The Little Brown Seed":

"I am of no use," said a little brown seed,
"Where shall I go and hide?

I am little, and brown, with nobody's love
And ugly beside."

*

"I'll begin by trying."

*

In these are taught the same lessons of strength and purity, of patient endeavor and of absolute trust in the goodness of God, which, without being tacked on as a moral, are as the breath of life, vivifying all this author's writings. The delightful humor making sunshine on every page, is essentially Mrs. Lothrop's own characteristic.

When Joel

One point in which most women writers fail, and many do not attempt, is Margaret Sidney's strongest. Her boys and men are thoroughly boyish and manly. When the young Peppers yell, theirs is the aboriginal war-whoop, which every mother recognizes. Peppers cries "Gee-whop! Gee-whoa!"— "bringing up occasionally against the four-poster or the high old bureau," with his imaginary steed, one can hear the plastering in the walls of the "little brown house" rattle down. And when the gentlemanly Jasper, delighted to meet a real boy, makes his way to Ben's home, every boy reader receives a lesson in instinctive courtesy, as Jasper "stepping upon the flat stone" by the simple Polly's side, takes off his cap with one hand as he extends the other in greeting.

What a jewel of a baby is "Phronsie!" shaking her yellow head as she inquires gravely of the stately Mr. King, as to his relish of the doughnut-boy, which she had made and sent to her "poor sick man; " Phronsie, too, who played her part, long before the advent of Mrs. Burnett's "Editha" and her "burglar," in a similar drama; Phronsie, with the sun shining through her hair, as she dances a pas seul among the drawing materials on the table, because "Benzie" had promised that she too, may join the drawing class.

Said Polly, "Isn't she sweet?" "Sweet," said Jasper, "I should think she was.”

Was ever a finer inspiration set before an American boy, than that of Tom Pettibone, who puts down his boyish rebellion against leaving home, that he may worthily uphold the honor of the "Pettibone name "; carrying with him a sermon which he never forgot, in his Aunt Judith's last words:

"I would not give much for the relig

Began to tremble and shake:

And make way for the little seed, hopeful now,

Her upward way to take.

*

and pull the coverlids over it. No; if I prayed I'd pray like a man!"

* **

Even in this book, one of the few written ostensibly for older people, Margaret Sidney's younger characters are not used to "fill in," but are made the inspiration of much of the finest action in the story. "Bobby Jane," with her "little stubby head," is no less exquisite in her baby charm, as she dives courageously into Doctor Pitcher's office, than is beautiful Judith Pettibone.

It was not until after the creation in print, of "Phronsie" and "Bobby Jane," that to Mrs. Lothrop came her own little yellow-haired Phronsie, whom she named for the mother of her dream-children, Margaret; the living embodiment of the child-life in her mother's previous books. At her summer home at the "Wayside," in Concord, Massachusetts (where Hawthorne settled after his seven years in Europe), in the same room in the tower that Hawthorne built, under the shadow of the larches that he loved,

stories for little folks, and may be, now and then, a story that will not hurt the old folks, with sometimes a bit of verse thrown in."

The author of "The William Henry Letters," "The Jimmy Johns," "Johnny Spicer's Lectures," and a dozen other books, Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, President of the Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, has immortalized in their pages her wealth of experience with boy and girl nature, through two generations. Two sons, and the grandchildren to whom she has been a mother from their earliest childhood, have been the actors in most of the dramatic situations portrayed in her writings; from the bewildering travels and adventures of "Polly Cologne," that rag baby "no bigger than a slate pencil", to the grownup ventures and experiences of "Lucy Maria" and her cousins. From growing humanity, in every stage of physical and mental progression, rather than from book-knowledge, Mrs. Diaz has acquired that shrewd insight into the thoughts and actions of childhood, which she so graphically describes.

There is, if we may coin a word, a common-sensibleness about all her fictitious children. A country simplicity, and unsophisticated directness of purpose, which appears the same in "William Henry's" letters of his school life, in the doings of the "Jimmy Johns" (those unremarkable, and yet always interesting twins, whose mother could only distinguish them by the blue and red flannel lozenges sewed inside their garments), and in all the management of romantic "Lucy Maria's" interest in the affairs of other lovers, known and "unknown".

If a flaw might be found in Mrs. Diaz's children, it is that among them all, there is not a weak nature, nor a thoroughly naughty child; and we can hardly believe that with so much experience, these have not come within that of Mrs. Diaz. But they are all heartsome stories, and many of them being written almost at the beginning of the new departure in children's books, Mrs. Diaz may be looked upon in one sense, as one of the pioneers.

She led the children over a kind of bridge, from "Cinderella" to her own

side, landed from the "Mayflower", and on the other from the "good ship Anne." The fervor of philanthropy and desire for universal education, which burned in Ichabod Morton's veins, lost none of its glow in the veins of his daughter Abigail, whose thought from her earliest memory has been for her fellows.

Secretary at fifteen of a juvenile antislavery society, whose membership fee was twenty-five cents, she raised half of her contribution by doing without butter, and knitted cotton garters to earn the rest; the funds of the society being put in the contribution box, passed at the anti-slavery meetings, which she attended. Listening to the appeals for the slaves, she "longed with unutterable desire for a gold watch" to give to the "liberation fund," remembering the Roman matrons, who cast in their jewels. This is the mental fibre of the woman whose ingenious mind has found it impossible to perpetuate, upon any page of her writings for the young, a weak nature. Her experiences with other children were so unique, that I must be forgiven for a brief allusion to at least one.

At the age of eighteen, while teaching near her home in Plymouth, the parents of some of her children became ambitious to have the accomplishment of dancing added to the less ornamental branches. Nothing daunted by lack of room or music, young Abigail opened a dancing class in the wood-room adjoin

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ing. With no music but her own voice, she merrily led them through the mazes of reel and quadrille, interrupting her singing of the dance-tunes by "calling off" the figures. The fame of the "dancing school" going abroad, the belles and beaux of the village who applied for admission necessitated a larger room.

Without means of paying rent, Abby obtained permission to occupy an unused foundry. This was separated from the road by a brook, which required all attending the class to cross on a plank, a difficult feat on a dark night. She covered the cracks and windows in the building with newspapers, hung up lanterns, which each pupil brought, and opened her class for a season of twelve lessons, charging a dollar for the twelve. After nine o'clock, young married people were admitted, and stepped it briskly to the one squeaky "fiddle" which furnished their music. So popular became her school that the next winter Abby went into a school-hall of the village, where she taught sixteen children, principally girls, whose older brothers were permitted to come to Miss Morton's "After Nines."

Imagine the tiny creature, with brilliant black eyes, and soft, dark brown hair, in which, even now, not a thread of silver appears. In a short, gray dress, which came a little below her knees, to show the "steps," trimmed with rows of red and blue braid, and with straight trousers of the same, "calling off" at the top of her lungs, above the noise of