upon our contributions, English nurseries absorbed them unhesitatingly, and English children read them, if not with interest, at least with meekness and docility. When the "Fairchild Family" and the "Lady of the Manor" crossed the Atlantic to our hospitable shores, we sent back, returning evil for evil, the "Youth's Book of Natural Theology," in which small boys and girls argue their way, with some kind preceptor's help, from the existence of a chicken to the existence of God, thus learning at a tender age the first lessons of religious doubt. At the same time that the "Leila" books and "Mary and Florence" found their way to legions of young Americans, "The Wide, Wide World," "Queechy," and "Melbourne House,"—with its intolerable little prig of a heroine—were, if possible, more immoderately read in England than at home. And in this case, the serious wrong-doing lies at our doors. If the "Leila" books be rather too full of sermons and pious conversations, long conversations of an uncompromisingly didactic order, they are nevertheless interesting and wholesome, brimming with adventures, and humanized by a very agreeable sense of fun.
