swiftly, promptly, but with quiet and certainty.”  Her definition of “good food” is to the point.  “It is not,” she says, “rich food, nor even the tolerable fare which is just undercooked and flavorless enough to tax digestion more than it ought.  It is the best of everything cooked in the nicest possible way, and with pleasant variety.”  Passing from the kitchen the care of the different rooms of the house is taken up—­the chambers, the sitting-room and the storeroom; instructions are given for making “blue Monday” less blue; the arts of starching and ironing are discussed; and a chapter is given to the mending and darning basket.  Other portions of the book are devoted to “Company Days,” “Shopping,” “Sickness in the House,” “Making the best of Things,” and “Helps that are Helps,” the servant-girl question forming the subject of the closing chapter.  The volume is very handsomely brought out, but even were it not, it would be worth its weight in gold to the young and inexperienced housekeeper.

GERTRUDE’S DIARY.  By Pansy.  Illustrated.  Boston:  D. Lothrop & Co.  Price 60 cts.  A new book by Pansy is always hailed with delight, and that delight generally mingled with wonder can possibly write so much and yet keep the freshness and brightness which runs through all her books.  Gertrude is a girl of fifteen, wide awake, full of life, generally good tempered, and yet with as many faults as most girls of her age have; faults which arise more from thoughtlessness than from intent.  She is one of four who agree to keep diaries, in accordance with a suggestion made by their Sunday-school teacher, and she records with impartiality all her good and bad times, her trials and her triumphs.  Aside from its interest, it contains suggestions which cannot fail to make an impression upon the mind of any young girl who reads it, and to strengthen her in like temptations and under the same conditions.  A pleasant story runs through the diary.

MANY COLORED THREADS.  From the Writings of Goethe.  Selected by Carrie Adelaide Cooke.  With an Introduction by Kev.  Alexander McKenzie, D.D.  Boston:  D. Lothrop & Co.  Price $1.00.  No other volume of the Spare Minute Series contains more real meat than this.  Goethe was epigrammatic, and his ideas took the concentrated form of bullets, instead of scattering like shot.  We doubt if there is another author, always excepting Shakespeare, from whose books so many noble and complete thoughts can be extracted.  In the two hundred and fifty pages of this volume are more than a thousand of these gems, each worth; its setting.  Dr. McKenzie says aptly of Goethe that he is able by virtue of his own genius to set more than the common man and to put his visions and his reflections in such form that others who would never have seen the tilings for themselves or been able to think deeply upon them, can have the benefit of his generous study and thought.  He was many-sided.  His mind took a wide range and seemed almost equally