( By Bess Bradford)

Are you ever lonely? Do you sometimes wish for companions who would understand your whims and fancies? Or for a friend, a merry chum with whom you could share a delighted chuckle over many little precious jokes and secrets? If so, I know you will be glad to hear of a place here (sic) you can go to choose just the friend you need. The best part of it is this, that friend will be just as glad to go with you as you will be to have her.

Of course, you know that I am talking about books. They are the friends, and the Library is the place where they longingly wait for you to come to choose them. Every girl would be glad to have Louisa May Alcott go home with her for a weekend. Somehow when you read or reread "Little Women" or "Jo’s Boys" or "Eight Cousins" you feel as if you were visiting for a time with a favorite aunt, one with a lively sense of humor and a relish for gay times.

So many lovely books are ready for you, little new Camp Fire girls, ready to teach you how to earn new honors, how to earn money for that Camp Fire dress you will wish to buy, how to study about trees and birds and flowers that you may come back from one of these long tramps in the woods that Camp Fire girls love, prepared to tell your Guardians just heaps of new, interesting things. "Music of the Wild," will inspire you to take your camera and go out to photograph some of Nature’s beauties. By the way, if you love to be out of doors, do try to find one of Hudson’s charming books or those shore(sic) stories by John Buroughs about the life of birds or bees.

Girls like adventures as well as boys, and so I know you would like, "The Log of the Easy Way," which tells how a young couple went down the Mississippi in a queer little house boat and had all kinds of funny experiences. That one is a true story; too.

Do you ever grow tired of fairy tales? I know that I never shall, and I was glad to see that one of the newest books in the Library is a new edition of "At the Back of the North Wind," with lively illustrations in color by Jessica Willcox Smith. Another book with a pretty, new dress is Jane Austen’s "Pride of Prejudice". The pictures are very quaint and would be fun to copy for a costume party, especially if you are able to carry out the part by acting just as Elizabeth did in that dear old-fashioned story.

You will always be glad to have made friends with these books. You may go back again and again for a visit with some especial favorite, "The Twilight Fairy Book," "The Brushwood Boy," or "Rebecca of the Sunnybrook Farm." Or you may go in the hopes of finding another book as good as "Kim," but always your friends will be waiting for you with love and sympathy and understanding, for after all, books are really people just dressed a little different, that’s all.

A local Camp Fire honor will be granted each Camp Fire Girl reading 8 books from this list including 2 of the starred ones.

Little Women; by L. M. Alcott.

* American Boy’s Book of Signs, Signals, Symbols; by Dan Beard.

* Burgess Bird Book for Children; by T. W. Burgess.

Secret Garden; by F. H. Burnett.

The Lost Prince; by F. H. Burnett.

* Self help to Piano Study; by Harriette Bower.

* Boy Scouts Hike Book; by Cave.

*Household Arts for School and Home; by Cooley & Spohr.

* A Confederate Girl’s Dairy (sic); by S. M. Dawson

Merrylips; by Beulah Dix.

Six to Sixteen; by J. H. Ewing.

When, She Comes Home From College; by Hurd.

Earning Her Way Through College; by Johnson.

The Pool of Stars; by Cornelia Meigs.

The Story of a Thousand Years Pine; by Enos Mills

The Journal of Countess Krasinska Cinder Pond; by C. W. Rankin.

Dandelion Cottage; by C. W. Rankin

The Adopting of Rosa Marie; by C.W. Rankin

Emmeline; by Elsie Singmaster.

* Gabriel and the Hour Book; by Evaleen Steen.

Seventeen; by Booth Tarkington.

Two Little Savages; by E. T. Seton

*Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc; by Mark Twain.

Tom Sawyer; by Mark Twain

Winona of Camp Karonya; by Margaret Widdemer.

Wonder Garden; by F. J. Olcott.

Taken from Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, Tuesday, February 8, 1921.