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THE SEA'S FAIRY BABIES, AS SHOWN BY
JESSIE WILCOX              SMITH'S ILLUSTRATIONS
FOR KINGSLEY'S "WATER BABIES"
By Permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.
             V all the books displayed this year for the delight of child
             or grown-up surely none are as utterly irresistible and
             altogether fascinating as the new edition of Kingsley's
             famous child's classic, "Water Babies," illustrated
by
             Jessie Wilcox Smith. Her sketches of Tom as a Water
1aby riding upon a fish, peering beneath water reeds,
             flying through space on a seaweed leaf, getting ac-
quainted with a lobster, her marvelous sketches of jellyfish, frogs,
water bubbles, sea flowers are things that have no parallel for beauty
or decorative charm in all the full list of children's books. Her under-
standing of children, her delightful fairy imagination, are seen at their
best in the illustrations for this book. Each of the full page illustra-
tions is worthy to be set in a frame of its own and made to adorn some
happy child's nursery.
   This is a book for the year round, not merely for Christmas morn-
ing. It is a book that should be taken down to the sea-shore in the
summer, that should be read aloud during the evening sleepy-hour,
that hour that fills children's minds with wonderful things to think
about just as they sail away to the Land of Nod. These pictures of
sea fairies give them something to dream about as surely as the
sory itself gives them something to remember all the days of their
life. Who of us who have read this story when we were young ever
look at a clean little sandy sea-garden with anemones clinging to the
rocks without remembering that Tom won his spurs to full under-
standing because he helped the water babies clean up the gardens and
put them to rights after every storm. We remember how after every
storm the babies mended all the broken seaweed and put all the rock
pools in order and planted all the shells again in the sand and put
the seaweeds, corallines and anemones in delightful little borders all
around the rocks.
  9 'l9                          -
   Happy are the children who get their first ideas of the marve
nature all around them from such a lesson book as this," says Ros
Kingsley, in the preface to her father's story that he calls a "I
tale," but which is so full of the ways of insect, bird, beast and pl
of land and sea that it might be classed as a scientific essay, save
no treatise was ever so charmingly written. And is it not diffi