Here is a bit of wise counsel from Charles Kingsley about the best way to study history:
"If you would understand history, you must first try to understand men and women. For history is the history of men and women, nothing else; and she who knows men and women thoroughly will best understand the past work of the world, and be best able to take a share in its work now.... If, therefore, any of you ask me how to study history, I should answer: 'Take, by all means, biographies—wheresoever possible, autobiographies—and study them. Fill your mind with live human figures, people of like passions with yourselves; see how they lived and worked in the time and place in which God put them.' Believe me that when you have thus made a friend of the dead, and brought them to life again, and let them teach you to see with their eyes and feel with their hearts, you will begin to understand more of their generation and their circumstances than all the mere history books of the period would teach you."
A. C.—St. Mary's Free Hospital is an Episcopal institution. We can not answer your first question.
We offer the C. Y. P. R. U. this week a variety of articles from which to choose. Mr. James Payn begins another of his thrilling stories of "Peril and Privation" on the great deep; the presence of mind and courage shown by little Alice Ivy will appeal to readers of all ages; Mr. Allan Forman gives us a glimpse into ornithology in his amusing article on "Mr. Thompson and the Bird with a Lantern"; and there is no small amount of information in regard to natural history to be gleaned from Mr. J. C. Beard's article on "Mr. Barnum's Show in Winter-Quarters." Capital entertainment for long evenings will be found in the game of "Nine Men's Morris," which Mr. James Otis gives us full and clear directions how to play.