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ous painters whose works had great vogue, but which are already going out of fashion. Meyer von Bremen’s pictures of Swiss child life and J. G. Brown’s of New York newsboys and bootblacks are of this class. They deal with local customs which are already passing. We speak of them as “old-fashioned”; but it never occurs to anybody to call the Spanish Beggar Boys old-fashioned. Fashion has nothing to do with them. Nor does the seventeenth-century setting prevent our enjoyment of the merrymaking in some of Jan Steen’s Dutch pictures. This painter did more children’s subjects than seems to be generally known. We debar, of course, any which are coarse in vein, but scenes of simple hilarity, even if it is of a boisterous kind, are good to have. Steen’s contemporary, Peter de Hooch, is at opposite poles in his choice of subjects, gentle, quiet, refined, and poetic. His demure little girls helping their mothers about the housework are the pattern of dutifulness. One can scarcely imagine them doing anything naughty, but they are not too prim to be thoroughly childlike and lovable. Among modern painters the French Millet and the Dutch Israels seem to me the most natural and spontaneous in their delineations of children’s occupations and amusements. In fact, the doings of country children seem to make a wider appeal than city subjects. It would be foolish to insist that a child’s pictures should be only those which have stood the test of years. As well give up all magazines and newspapers. It is well, however, to keep in mind the difference between the permanent and the transient. The