# What Katy Did/Advertisments

Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
By the Author of "What Katy Did."
THE NEW-YEAR'S BARGAIN:
A CHRISTMAS STORY FOR CHILDREN.
BY SUSAN COOLIDGE.
WITH 27 ILLUSTRATIONS BY ADDIE LEDYARD.
One volume.Square 12mo.Cloth, gilt.Price, $1.50.
A distinguished author (J. R. L.) says: "You know how to write a delightful book. I have read it with very great pleasure."
From the Boston "Transcript."
"'The New-Year's Bargain' is the title of one of the most charming of the many charming books for the young, which loving, wise and witty spirits are inventing in these days, and which make us wish we were children, or rather make us children again. This is one of the latest of the rich collection of choice books issued by the enterprising and tasteful house of Roberts Brothers, and comes out in a style of print and illustration worthy of its delightful contents."
Mrs. Hale, in "The Ladies' Book."
"Miss Coolidge's name is not known to us, but we prophecy that her hooks will be great favorites with children. She knows just what pleases them. This is the story of a little German boy, to whom every month came with a story and a present. It is a dozen tales bound together in one."
From the "Providence Journal"
"This jolly little book should be in the hands of every clever little child. But children of a riper growth will enjoy it quite as much. It would be a pity to tell the tale, which is framed on a quaint and novel device, worthy of Hawthorne. Suffice it to say, that the reader will be as much charmed with it as he was with 'Alice in Wonder Land.' To our thinking, it is the best of the two, for it is full of true life, true childhood, true fun, and beside it 'Alice' seems a little artificial."
Mrs. Spofford, in the "Newburyport Herald."
"We do not hesitate to say that 'The New-Year's Bargain,' by Susan Coolidge, is one of the most charming juvenile books of the period, uniting, as it does, the unreal and the practical. It is a series of stories, funny and fantastic, told by the months to two children in the Black Forest, and will not fail to interest grown-up folks as well. It is full of picturesque effects, aside from the illustrations, which are exceedingly pretty, while it is one of those books so useful to the young, which abounds in poetic suggestion."
Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of the price, by the Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston.
page
MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS.
THE DOLL-WORLD SERIES.
BY MRS. ROBERT O'REILLY.
Comprising "Doll World," "Deborah's Drawer," and "Daisy's Companions."
Three beautiful volumes, illustrated and bound in cloth, black and gilt lettered, and put up in a neat box.Price $3.00; or, separately, $1.00 each.
From the Boston Daily Advertiser.
One rarely meets with three so thoroughly charming and satisfactory books for children as the "Doll- World Series," by Mrs. Robert O'Reilly. Their author seems to possess—and in a high degree—every one of the very peculiar and varied characteristics which fit one to be a good writer for the young. She is humorous,—one ought perhaps to say funny, for that is the word which the children understand best; and Mrs. O'Reilly's wit is not the sly satire which appeals in a kind of aside to the adults present, but the bubbling merriment which is addressed directly to the ready risibles of her proper audience. She is pathetic also, with the keen, transitory pathos which belongs to childhood, a pathos never too much elaborated or top distressingly prolonged. She is abundantly dramatic. Her stories are full of action. Her incidents, though never forced or unnatural, are almost all picturesque, and they succeed one another rapidly.
Nevertheless we have not yet noted Mrs. O'Reilly's chief excellence as a storywriter, nor is it easy to find a single word to express that admirable quality. We come nearest it, perhaps, when we say that her tales have absolute reality; there is in them no suggestion of being made up, no visible composition. The illusion of her pictures is so perfect that it is not illusion. This note of reality, which ought to be prevalent in any romance, is positively indispensable in a juvenile one, and it is perfectly delivered by one only of our native writers of children's books That one is of course Miss Alcott. Her "Little Women" are as real as Daisy Grey and Bessie Somers; the "Little Men" very nearly so. We have other writers who approach Miss Alcott, more or less closely: Mrs. Walker, Aunt Fanny, Susan Coolidge in the more realistic parts of the "New Year's Bargain;" and indeed the latter writer comes so near truth, and is also so like the author of the "Doll World" stories in the quality of her talent, that one hopes her next essay may be absolutely successful in this regard.
From the New York Tribune.
The pretty edition of Mrs. Robert O'Reilly's works, just issued by Messrs. Roberts Brothers, will be welcome to a throng of juvenile readers as the first gift-book of the autumn. It is hard to say which of the three charming; volumes comprised in this series will be most liked at the nursery hearth. We fancy "Doll World" appeals most tenderly to the affections of little matrons with baby-houses and families of wood and wax to care for; though "Deborah's Drawer," with its graceful interlinking of story with story, is sure to be the elected favorite of many. Our own preference is for "Daisy's Companions," and this for a reason less comprehensible to children than to older people; namely, that the story closes, leaving the characters in the midst of their childish lives, and without hint of further fate or development.
There are few books for children which we can recommend so thoroughly and so heartily as hers. And as one of our wise men has told us that "there is a want of principle in making amusements for children dear," Messrs. Roberts Brothers deserve thanks for giving us these volumes in a form at once so tasteful and so inexpensive.
Sold everywhere. Mailed, postpaid, by the Publishers,
ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston