or, what is better, "Seventeen."

Now nobody has yet done anything so delightful, so mirth provoking, so
pathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of the
knowledge of this book, for when I swam into the tide of literature,
Booth Tarkington was in that world from which Wordsworth's boy came,
bringing rainbows, which moved to all the music of the spheres. It was
during the late war that "Seventeen" was cast on the coasts of Denmark,
at a time when American books scarcely reached those coasts at all. St.
Julian, the patron of merry travellers, must have guided it through the
maze and labyrinths of bombs and submarines in the North Sea. It arrived
just when the world seemed altogether upside down; when death was the
only real thing in life, and pain as much a part of the daily routine as
the sunshine, and when joy seemed to have been inexplicably crushed from
the earth, because sorrow was ever so recurrent that it could not be
forgotten for a moment. Then "Seventeen" arrived.

Booth Tarkington may have his ups and downs in future, as he has had in
the past. "The Gentleman from Indiana" seemed to me to be almost one of
the most tiresome books ever invented, while "Monsieur Beaucaire" was
one of the most fascinating, charming. You can hardly find a better
novel of American life than "The Turmoil," unless it is Judge Grant's
"Unleavened Bread."

But the best novels of American life seem to be written in order to be
forgotten. Who reads "The Breadwinners" now? Or who, except the
professional "teacher" of literature, recalls "Prue and I"? Or that
succession of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, almost unequalled as
pictures of a section of our life, each of which better expresses her
talent than "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? The English and the French have longer
memories. Mrs. Oliphant's "Chronicles of Carlingford"--some of us
remember "Miss Majoribanks" or "Phoebe Junior"--finds a slowly
decreasing circle of readers. And while "Sapho" is almost forgotten,
"Les Rois en Exil['e]" and "Jack" are still parts of current French
literature. But "Unleavened Bread" or "The Damnation of Theron Ware" or
"Elsie Venner" or the "Saxe Holm's Stories" are so much of the past as
to be unread.

To the credit of the gentle reader, Miss Alcott's stories perennially
bloom. And, for some strange reason, the weird "Elsie Dinsmore" series
is found under the popular Christmas tree, while nobody gives the Rollo
books to anybody. Why?