Bowling Green, Ohio.
In a recent number of Harper's Young People there was an article on "Marbles," and this week I am going to write about them. Almost every boy knows how to play marbles by making a trench about an inch deep and a foot long. The distance for the marble to roll should be nine or ten feet. As many boys as choose to can play at this game, and the one whose marble goes in the trench, or the nearest to it, takes the others' marbles. If there is a tie, of course they have to begin over again.
Span is another very interesting game. Only two can play this. The one who plays first throws his marble against something, like a wall, so that it bounds back again; then the other boy follows him, and if the marble falls near enough to the first one to span the difference, or distance between the two, both marbles are his; if he can not span the distance, each boy keeps his own marble, and they reverse the order in which they played before.
I am a little boy ten years old, and have taken Young People almost two years. I liked "Toby Tyler" very much, also almost all of the other stories, but I think Jimmy Brown's letters are best of all; it seems to me every boy must sympathize with him.
Eddy F.
I wish I could persuade Eddy and all the other boys to return whatever marbles they may win as soon as their games are finished. Then nobody's feelings will be hurt.
Brunswick, Mississippi.
We have only three pets, a dog named Cricket, a cat named Maxie, and a pigeon; I have not named the latter yet, for I want to ask some of the readers of this paper to please tell me some pretty name.
I want to tell you about the high water in the Mississippi Valley. It was not quite over our gallery, and it is nearly all gone out of our yard now. I felt so sorry for the poor people who were suffering so in the raging billows of our beautiful river. We have all been so thankful to God for saving us from a watery grave. There has been but one life lost here, and that was that of a man in a tricky dug-out. We have several boats, or dug-outs. I will tell you the names of them—the Arkansas Toothpick, the Box-toed Slipper, and the Bob Lee. We have a flat, but we do not think it requires a name. I can paddle a dug-out. The boys get many a "ducking."
Maggie Lela H.
Beech Island, South Carolina.