. Thomas Nelson and Sons. It is, by the way, a noteworthy
coincidence that his first and last printed work should have been issued
by this house). His contribution to _The Morning of Life_ was an
account in two parts of a boating expedition on the Thames, entitled
"Camping Out." It has in it the promise of the freshness and vigour
that were in such abundant degree characteristic of all his later
descriptions of boy life.

It was in the pages of the _Boy's Own Paper_ that Reed found his
_metier_. Its editor writes: "From the very first number of the paper
Mr Reed has been so closely and continuously identified with it, that
his removal creates a void it will be impossible to fill." Any one
looking through the volumes of this most admirably-conducted boys' paper
will see that Talbot Reed's work is indeed the backbone of it. In
Number One, Volume One, the first article, "My First Football Match," is
by him; and during that year (1879) and the following years he wrote
vivid descriptions of cricket-matches, boat-races; "A Boating Adventure
at Parkhurst;" "The Troubles of a Dawdler;" and a series of papers on
"Boys in English History." There was also a series of clever sketches
of boy life, called "Boys we have Known," "The Sneak," "The Sulky Boy,"
"The Boy who is never Wrong," etcetera.

These short flights led the way, and prepared him for the longer and
stronger flights that were to follow. In 1880 his first boys' book
began to appear in the _Boy's Own Paper_, entitled "The Adventures of a
Three-Guinea Watch." Charlie Newcome, the youthful hero, is a charming
creation, tenderly and pathetically painted, and the story abounds in
thrilling incident, and in that freshness of humour which appears more
or less in all the Public School Stories. In the following year came a
story of much greater power, "The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's," by
many boys considered the best of all his stories. It deserves to take
its place on the shelf beside "Tom Brown's Schooldays." Indeed, a
youthful enthusiast who had been reading "The Fifth Form" and "Tom
Brown" about the same time, confided to me that while in the latter book
he had learned to know and love one fine type of boy, in the former he
learned to know and to love a whole school. The two brothers, Stephen
and Oliver Greenfield, and Wraysford, and Pembury, and Loman stand out
with strong personality and distinctness; and especially admirable is
the art with which is depic