out" life, in which we have not lived half our own details. We have the joy in books that little children give us when they frolic for us, as our sedateness, or our older muscles, will not let us frolic for ourselves; the pleasure we feel in dance and springing motion which we have quieted away from, when we see girls trip fleetly to the music, and we are conscious of all the music and lightfootedness within ourselves.

So, I think, we are never tired of real children's stories, or of the best chronicles of happy, earnest, onlooking, even tried and temporarily troubled girlhood. It is all a part of ourselves, since we are child and girl, and all we have been; and the more, that we are also in the beyond of years, and know something of the way out when the page is dark. It is such a refreshment to run back over the long trail, and even to start again. I am never tired of such books as Sophie May writes; of her "Dottie Dimples” and “ Flaxie Frizzles and "Little Prudies;" or as Mrs. Molesworth and Mrs. Wiggin and Clara Burnham and Miss Nouchette Carey give us in "Us," "The Birds' Christmas Carol," "Next Door," "Not Like Other Girls," and such sort. I read

66

them now, without a thought of any missing, in that they did not come in my own childhood and girl-time, for they put me back into both, calling them up in me from where they lie hidden, and enlarge and interpret them anew for me. I think of those that I did read fifty and sixty years ago; they come crowding back to me as I write these lines, and I would like to tell you of them, and try to convey to you something of the fragrance that stirs in me at the recollection, and the feeling of own-ship that comes with their very titles. Books of to-day some of them, but there is such a confusion and difference of many

may come to you a long time hence, as these to me; yet of these old ones you may even now gather good and pleasure, as out of the foregone time when your grandmothers loved them. A few may be only dear to any one as things of memory, and a delight that would no longer repeat itself in their obsolete particulars; but with this memory that I have I could not quite leave them out in the retrospect, even though in this fin de siècle everybody should be "out of print" who might in the old days have sympathized with me. But I shall have to

leave it to the possibility of another letter; for a beginning this one has stretched quite far enough. Perhaps it is but a perhaps; I can make no pledges even to myself for the future other letters may follow, in which I may say more of these things and of other things, if you care to hear.

I have spoken thus far chiefly of stories; of the reading which girls will take to, and in which they need first guidance. They are, indeed, my special province; you will not blame a story-teller, any more than I their readers, for having loved them; without such love the story-teller's own work would never have been done; yet it is also true that without some abstract loves and studies there could be little deep significance to imaginations of life, any more than to its actualities. The stronger things, which underlie the stories, may come later. I would even be glad to ask you to enter reverently with me over the threshold of the highest realm, where the eternal Word lies open, utters itself, and still calls to us with that same severe demand and condition which we have seen all real words do make, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”

III

ABOUT THE BOOKS OF OUR OLD GIRLHOOD

Do you know I dearly love a bit of philology — of word tracing? I think you may have found it out. As I sat down to begin this letter, thinking of myself, half strangely, in my late sixties, writing to "girl friends,” and drawing from the girl in me the impulse and wherewithal to write, I asked myself, "What, truly, after all, is a girl?" And I went to dear old Noah Webster to find out if he would help me to confirm my faith in girlhood as a kind of perennial thing-a part of our nature which does last on into the fifties and sixties, and all the way through; and not a mere external, passing condition of life, dropped far behind and reachable only by a keen memory, or a rare, universal sympathy. And he tells me that in the old English the word was used for a young person of either sex. He gives the Saxon of it

"ceorl "

whence "churl," a rustic. Now, what do you see in that? I think I see this: a girl is an immature possibility a something human not all developed, a simplicity not yet complicated; therefore, a creature who has great things to look forward to, and to reach. In this, then, are we not all girls together, whether in the dawning "teens or the far along "ties"? And is it not the secret of the sympathies between us? I looked further, and investigated the Saxon "eorl," which seems to hold the greater part of the meaning, and found it as I expected, the root of the lordly title, "earl." So "ceorl," the girl, and even the churl, holds within itself the term of a high nobility. Need I explain that to a flat minuteness? I will not; I will leave its suggestion to yourselves.

Now, again, about our books. Possibly, as I am in my girlhood with you, going back and realizing my own "teens" with you through friendly rapport, and feeling, also, that the girls as old as I am are of our fellowship in the same way possibly you may like to hear, and they to recall, what was the reading of half a century ago for those who are old ladies