ters are among our best.

II--STORIES OF ROMANCE AND MYSTERY

Bertha Runkle's The Helmet of Navarre may perhaps stand at the very head
of our romantic novels, for its wonderfully vivid representation of life
and adventure in Paris under her famous hero. It is all the more
remarkable because it was the author's first book, and written when she
was only a girl. Read the closing chapter.

Amelie Rives, now the Princess Troubetzkoy, has several romantic novels,
notably The Quick or the Dead and A Brother to Dragons, both written in
an intense, dramatic way; her Virginia of Virginia, while different, is
no less fascinating. Her books have the setting of the South. Read from
the last.

Molly Elliot Seawell has written a great number of books, all carefully
done and of great variety of subjects. Her Sprightly Romance of Marsac,
which took a three-thousand-dollar prize and is as gay as its title
indicates, has for its foils the more serious The House of Egremont and
Midshipman Paulding. Read from the first.

Anna Katherine Green has many books about the detection of crime, with
complicated plots. Her The Leavenworth Case is her best book; others are
The Mill Mystery, Behind Closed Doors, and The Filigree Ball. Read from
The Leavenworth Case.

III--STORIES OF LIFE PROBLEMS

The greatest problem novel ever written by a woman was Uncle Tom's
Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Clubs should give at least one meeting
to this book, studying the times, the character of the author and her
training, as the causes which led to its writing; notice also the effect
of the book upon the nation. It has passed into many other languages
than ours, and has a world-wide fame.

Mrs. Stowe also wrote another book with a great theme, The Minister's
Wooing, of early Colonial days and the power of Calvinism in the lives
of the people. Read from both these books.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Mrs. Ward) began her work at nineteen with The
Gates Ajar, suggested by the sorrow of the Civil War; this had a
phenomenal success. From that time on she wrote steadily, and each novel
had a problem to present, set out with strong emotion. A Singular Life
is one of her best, and The Story of Avis, Doctor Zay, and The
Confessions of a Wife are all deeply interesting. Read from the first
two.

Margaret Deland has taken up the problems of life in her books with
sympathy, humor and a certain wise and tender philosophy. Her stories of
Old Chester, its delight