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Mrs. Alice Hamilton Rich, of Minneapolis, Minn., has become editor of the home department of the Children's Home Finder, Davenport, Iowa. Mrs. Rich has written for the Sunday School Times, the Home Maker, and, other papers and magazines both prose and poetry that have won commendation from able critics.

Opie Read, the well-known writer of Southern stories, will retire January 1 from the editorship of the Arkansaw Traveler, the paper that has been made famous by his quaint and humorous sketches. The success of Mr. Read's latest books, "A Kentucky Colonel" and "Emmett Boulore," has been such that he has decided to give up editorial duties and devote his whole time to strictly literary work.

With its January number the Inland Printer, Chicago, announces its third removal, and the beginning of the year 1892 finds the magazine in still finer quarters than before, at 212 and 214 Monroe street. No one who is interested in printing or publishing can afford to do without the Inland Printer.

A feature of the Atlantic for January is Henry James' delightful article of reminis cence and criticism on James Russell Lowell. It deals particularly with Lowell's London life, and sketches the part that Mr. Lowell played in the English literary and social world very appreciatively.

Eugene Field, perhaps the best known of the literati of Chicago, is a delightful host. He lives in a rambling old house in the northern part of the city. He has a mania for the curious, and his rooms are filled with interesting articles, valuable from association mostly. He will show you in one breath the pictured group of wife and children, and the next a painted wooden horse, crude of shape and violent in color, the work of Toole, the comedian, while playing Caleb Plummer. All sorts of odds and ends, from the centres of Europe or the wilds of the West, make up his treasures. The manuscript volume of his Horace, now in press, is a work of art. His script is a miracle of fineness, as minute as the tracks of a fairy spider, and he has illuminated it like an old misse

His humor and his cordiality are mixed in about equal parts. He is a good diner out and a most amusing friend.

The useful memorandum calendar of the Pope Manufacturing Company (Boston) is in the form of a pad containing 367 leaves, each 5x 2 inches. At the bottom of each leaf is a blank for memoranda.

The Magazine of American History (New York) opens its twenty-seventh volume with the New Year.

The January number (1892) of Lippincott's Magazine contains a novel of newspaper life, entitled "The Passing of Major Kilgore," by Young E. Allison, late managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. The same number opens the Journalists' Series by publishing "The Editor-in-Chief's Story," by Alexander K. McClure, editor of the Philadelphia Times. The Journalists' Series will consist of a number of contributions from prominent newspaper men, who will tell their personal experiences, and give glimpses of the editorial sanctums and inner workings of various leading newspapers throughout the country. Contributions will follow the first instalment under such headings as these: "The Managing Editor's Story," "The City Editor's Story," "The Dramatic Editor's Story," "The Literary Editor's Story," "The Reporter's Story," etc. In this way an insight into the lives of newspaper men at work and at play will be given, and the methods of getting out the great dailies will be illustrated.

That delightfully fresh and interesting writer, John Fiske, is often seen with bulky packages of manuscript on his way to or from the Riverside Press. He is soon to complete his twovolume work on "The Discovery of America," which has cost him many months of labor and research. In this book Mr. Fiske gives copious foot-notes and numberless citations as to sources of authority of the quoted matter, and after capping a humorous story, admirably told, with an apt quotation, gravely puts in a reference to inform his reader in a foot-note that this is taken from the "Pickwick Papers," chapter and page so-and-so.

"The Opportunities for Writers" is the leading article in the Inland Printer (Chicago) for December.

A new monthly magazine, School and College, devoted to secondary and higher education, and edited by Ray Greene Huling, is published. by Ginn & Company. The first number is that for January.

Steps have been taken to establish an "Authors' Museum" in St. Petersburg, to contain mementos and relics of famous Russian literary men and women.

A writer in Kate Field's Washington proposes the establishment of a poetry paper, to be published weekly, and to be devoted entirely "to the loveliest of the Muses," the expenses to be borne by the stockholders.

There are 1,125 characters in the twenty-four books that Charles Dickens wrote.

R. R. Bowker is at work on an "American Bibliography of the Nineteenth Century," which will give the titles and suitable details of all books published in this country from 1800 to 1890.

Acton Davies, the author of "Sawed Off," "Little Lot's Message," "Earning an Epitaph," and other sketches published in recent numbers of Short Stories, Romance, and Current Literature, is only twenty-two years of age. He is a Canadian by birth, the son of an English army officer, and he has held a position on the New York Evening Sun reporting staff for the past year. "Dimple and Dumpling," his most successful sketch, has been republished more than fifty times in the daily papers.

A new feature in the New England Magazine is a department headed "In a Corner at Dodsley's," a gossip about writers and books by Walter Blackburn Harte.

It is said that a novel will soon come from the press, by a well-known society girl of Boston, which will make quite a sensation. The tale, though a first venture, is strong, the local color good, and many a veiled allusion adds zest to the telling.

Maurice Thompson is reading the proofs of his collected poems at his home in the beautiful village of Bay Saint Louis. Mr. Thompson is

The January Arena has a fine frontispiece truly a representative and the foremost poet of portrait of Walt Whitman.

Mrs. Margaret Deland is practically secluding herself, so far as she can, from her social duties, in order to put all her efforts into her new novel, which she believes will be her best work. The manuscript will not be finished within two years. The published paragraph that Mrs. Deland is preparing for the press a volume of short stories is incorrect.

Women authors, having been excluded from the proposed Authors' Club of London on the ground of their inability to pay the required fees and subscriptions, are about to found a club of their own.

Pope received $25,000 for his version of Homer. But the prize winner in a competition opened by the proprietors of a half-penny journal in England has just been paid $5,000 for five lines of verse composing the "poem" which was adjudged the best offered. This is at the rate of $1,000 a line, and, say, $100 a word, making this the most costly poem on record.

the South, and the gems of verse which have appeared from time to time in our magazines are worthy of preservation in permanent form.

The twenty-fifth volume of Harper's Bazar begins with the number for January 2, 1892. This number contains the opening chapters of a new serial by Walter Besant, entitled "The Ivory Gate." The first instalment of William Black's new story, "The Magic Ink," will appear in the issue of January 9, and it will run through about four numbers.

The firm of D. Lothrop Company has just issued a new book for juveniles, entitled "A Little Millionaire," by Martha Livingstone Moody, illustrated by Louis Meyville. The story is one to captivate the heart of childhood. Mrs. Moody is a Western lady of Southern birth. The city of Indianapolis claims her as a resident, but she is at present living in New York. She is the author of a novel, "The Brinkwater Tragedy," published by Cassell & Co.; also of "Alan Thorne," issued some time ago by the Lothrops.

Muell

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A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS.

BOSTON, FEBRUARY, 1892.

VOL. VI.

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Little more than a year ago Miss Mary Elizabeth Hawker, writing as "Lanoe Falconer," appeared upon the literary scene. A tiny volume, entitled "Mlle. Ixe," commenced a reputation, which has been well sustained by the succeeding publication, “Hotel de L'Angleterre," and enhanced by the latest, "Cecilia de Noël."

Miss Hawker is a member of an old Hampshire family, and the granddaughter of. Colonel Peter Hawker, whose work on shooting is still quoted by sportsmen. In one of those Hampshire valleys whose endearing beauties are again and again so lovingly depicted in "Mlle. Ixe" and "Cecilia de Noël," Miss Hawker has passed almost all her life, an environment

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so sleepy, so dull, that one doubts if without the robuster incidents of a Scotch mother, a Scotch birthplace, and occasional wanderings in foreign lands, it could have produced anything so mundane and so alert as a popular author.

Outwardly her life was as unbroken as the dear little stream which flows past the old country house. Inwardly it was a tale of steady development under a somewhat hard discipline. Close study pursued in spite of constant ill health and its interruptions, steady writing never relaxed under continued discouragement, ripened a nature too strong to sink easily, and too full of keen humors to be ever anything but the brightest and most amusing member of the home circle.

And certainly the discouragement was severe. With the exception of an occasional magazine article, Miss Hawker could get none of her manuscripts accepted. One copy of "Mlle. Ixe," strange to say, was worn brown and tattered by journeys to and from publishers and editors. It was trying, but perhaps not to be regretted. These long years of probation developed a higher ideal of work, a greater finish of execution, and it is doubtful if, without their maturing influence, the heights and depths of "Cecilia de Noël "— Lanoe Falconer's gospel, as one writer calls it could have been reached. Even thus looking back on the severe study and incessant toil of these probationary years, no one can feel that the success which now cheers on Miss Mary Hawker has been cheaply bought or lightly earned.

In answer to a question very often addressed to her, Miss Hawker replies that she has never been in Russia, and when she wrote "Mlle. Ixe" had never seen a Russian. The (uninten

Copyright, 1892, by WILLIAM H. HILLS. All rights reserved.

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