The two annual volumes of the related magazines, Good Words,
edited by Donald Macleod, D.D., and the Sunday Magazine (Isbister and Co., 7s. 6d. each), are as welcome as ever. The subtle difference between them, consisting, we might say, in the mingling of the secular and religious elements, is kept up with great skill. They are admirably contrived to complement each other. In Good Words there is one serial story, "The Pay- master's Boy," by Neil Munro, running through the year; in the Sunday Magazine two, "At the Eleventh Hour," by David Lyall, and "The Touchstone," by Helen Shipton, continued through tax and seven parts respectively. "Short Stories and Sketches" are an important item in both, but fiction is not allowed to pre- ponderate. This is as it should be, but no one knows better than the experienced editors of these magazines that the task of keeping them up to the standard of interest that setures popular faaeur is made thereby much harder. Fill three-fourths of your pages with tales by authors of repute, and success is assured. When, on the contrary, you demand the atten tion of your readers for more serious matters, his labor, 1), hoc opus est. It is chiefly by the miscellaneous contents of the magazines that they ought to be judged. In Good Words we may note the papers on literature (though we must express in passing our dissent from Mr. W. Sharp's encomium on a writer who shall be nameless), on popular science (as,,e.g., Mr. John Ward's description of the great Egyptian reservoir), and on travel (as Mr. F. T. Brillen's "Page of Antarctic History"). In the Sunday Magazine "Sunday Evenings with the Children," a series of established favour which we are glad to see continued ; "Red Letter Days," a set of interesting autobiographical papers by Mrs. L. T. Meade, the Rev. R. F. Horton, Canon Knox Little, and
others; and the "Nature Papers," including two by the well- known expert, the Rev. Hugh Macmillan. We are glad to reoog- nise the reasonable tone of Dr. Hayman's paper on "Inexact Statements in Holy Scripture."
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