In my book business, it always is a pleasure to come across old newspapers and magazines. I am in possession of a large number of Harper's Weekly magazines from the 1897-98 period and, news about the Maine and the Klondike aside, there is some interesting reading at hand. In light of the recent trouble in which our friend Huck has once again found himself, I offer the following from Harper's Weekly, March 19, 1898. Strange experiences fall to the lot of the adjective "colored." We are used to speaking of negroes as colored people. That usage commends itself to polite people as euphemistical, but the derivatives of it as passing queer [now there is one for the gay rights folks; wouldn't this be rather painful?] "For a Colored Reformatory," is the head-line of a recent paragraph in a Boston paper, from which it appeared that the Negro Reformatory Association at Richmond, Virginia, wants funds (for what, by the way, seems a good purpose). What is a negro reformatory in Richmond becomes, apparently, a colored reformatory when it reaches Boston. In the hearing of the present paragrapher some one recently accused Joel Chandler Harris of writing "colored dialect," and that happened not in Boston at all, but in New York. No doubt there is a "colored press," the friends and owners of which would resent the supposition of uninformed persons that perhaps it was "yellow." The truth is that the immense increase in the scope and descriptive force of "yellow" has made "colored" rather too ambiguous a word for miscellaneous use. It seems as though only the calendar changes. Regards, Marcus W. Koechig