Beadle's New Dime Novels, No. 116

This is a catalog of Beadle and Adams publications, predominantly instructional and reference works. The document lists the publisher's "Standard School Series" (speaker collections, dialogues, and elocution guides numbered 1–20, plus musical volumes), "Young People's Series" (letter-writing, etiquette, dream interpretation, fortune-telling, dancing, games, chess, croquet, and beauty guides), and "Family Series" (physician and cooking references). The principal serialized content is the opening of Ned Starling by J. Stanley Henderson, set in December 1835 in Arkansas. Two travelers meet on the road to Mississippi: Edward "Ned" Starling, a former frontier soldier seeking to settle in Tennessee to marry a woman he loves, and Benjamin Higbie, a Methodist itinerant preacher of thirty years traveling to a new conference. They discuss weather predictions, their backgrounds, religion, and morality before an approaching storm. Higbie insists that Starling's secular morality is insufficient without religious conversion.