January Magazines.

Harper's for January begins with an article on Julian Ralph on "The Old Way to Dixie," thoroughly and excellently illustrated by William T. Smedley. Mr. Ralph has a faculty of being able to spend a week in a portion of the country and coming away with an exhaustive knowledge of it. So, in the present case, he describes a trip down the Mississippi and is geographically as much at home as if he had spent his life going from Cairo to Memphis and back again.

Mr. Howells contributes another of his delightful little farces, entitled "The Unexpected Guests" and the name of Richard Harding Davis once more appears after a short story. And here again we meet a friend, Mr. Hefty Burke - of masquerade ball fame - but although the story is undeniably interesting and entertaining, it is not to be compared with Mr. Davis's best work. It is an impossible tale and after finishing it, one gets back and says "It's good but it's absurd."

Dr. A. Conan Doyle, who made his first appearance before American Magazine readers some months ago as the author of a marvellously ghostly tale called "Lot No. 249," reappears with the first chapters of a novel entitled "The Refugees."

The other articles of the number are: "Proletarian Paris" by Theodore Child; "Why we left Russia" by Poultney Bigelow; "Tennyson" by Annie Fields; and a number of stories by Elizabeth Stuart Phelphs Ward, Henry Van Dyke, and Constance Fennimore Woolson.

SCRIBNER'S."The One I knew Best of all" Frances Hodgson Burnett's account of her own childhood, is perhaps the most noteworthy contribution of the current Scribner's. There is a paper on the Peary Relief Expedition by the chief of the expedition and another of the articles on the "Poor in Great Cities," deals with Naples. Frederic Crowninshield gives the "Impressions of a Decorator in Rome."

Of the stories, what should be but certainly is not the most interesting to a Harvard man is Frederick J. Stimson's "Los Caraquenos." It is altogether too long and is tiresome.

THE COSMOPOLITAN.The Cosmopolitan begins with a frontispiece from one of Sir Frederick Leighton's most beautiful paintings. The Making of an Illustrated Magazine" is very properly placed first, for it surpasses in interest the other articles of the number. It is illustrated with many portraits and photographs. Gerald Campbell writes of "Four Famous Artists," Herbert Herkomer, George F. Watts, Sir Frederick Leighton and Sir John E. Millias, and there are some reproductions of their works and photographs of their studios.

Brander Mathews writes of the "Muses Manhattan" and Richard Henry Stoddard has a paper on the "English Laureates."

The rest of the number is devoted to contributions by Edwin Arnold, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Robinson and others.