Jane Eyre

INSIDE TODAY WHAT THEY'RE SAYING TODAY'S SUN COLUMNISTS It's cool, you fool Whining about the sizzling summer in Charm City? Just watch the saga of six truckers risking ice and limb driving in the frozen Arctic. today baltimoresun.com/cowherd Making a difference With each game, it becomes clearer how well interim manager Dave Trembley is selling an inspirational message to the Orioles and their fans. sports baltimoresun.com/steele OTHER VOICES Mike Dresser hears from bikers -- Maryland 5 THINGS TO DO TODAY Croc Week -- Visitors to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore get the opportunity to see training sessions with the zoo's two slender-snouted crocodiles and learn more about crocodiles from experts.

KATIE, my 4-year-old niece, already had heard me read several bedtime stories. "Now," she said, "read me a story out of your head."She settled her own head on the pillow and listened. There were no pictures, no pop-ups, no fancy cartoons -- just the rhythm of her breathing and the rise and fall of my voice. She had heard the story before: little girl lost, little girl found, happy ever after. My story ended in a whisper.I looked to see if her eyes were closed, but they stared back. "Just one more," she pleaded, then surrendered to her thumb.

Starting Saturday, a miniature Quran no larger than your thumb will be on display at the Walters Art Museum. Page after page of the 17th-century text from Turkey is filled with words that look as though they were scrawled by fleas. Each of the original's 114 "suras" or chapters is faithfully reproduced in its entirety. Talk about reading the fine print. "How can little things possess so much power?" the Walters' Ben Tilghman wonders. "As long as there has been writing, there have been miniature manuscripts.

Ted Rubinstein, who drives for Valley Cab, thinks he's heard about 1,000 stories, and almost all of them pretty good. In fact, some of them were classics. He's listened to Dickens, Faulk-ner and the Bronte sisters while driving. You name the story, and Rubinstien has probably heard it."I listen to books on tape because I am not a good reader, never been," he says. "It would probably have taken five of my lifetimes to read what I've heard on tape. I started in 1988 with all the books I'd heard of but never read, what you'd call the classics."

Why, it's a positively delicious concept. The Senator, tha august yet sedate purveyor of the very finest in bourgeois cinema fare, that living museum of good taste and refinement, 1939-style, that last bastion of Middlebrow Art on York Road . . . showing porn?Well, not quite. However, the Senator is showing an NC-17 film, full of writhing bodies and tasteful nudity, and the one slip of frontal male anatomy that earns "Wide Sargasso Sea" its NC-17 has got to be looked for with a good deal of concentration, lest it be missed.

Good writers know that what they leave out of a story is often as important as what they put in. Some things are best left to the reader's imagination, especially if you're writing horror or psychological suspense. As Henry James once noted, "Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself."Joyce Carol Oates does just that in the 16 neo-Gothic tales collected in "Haunted." It's the ambiguity shading the macabre that makes the best of these stories so fascinating and, yes, so horrifying.

WASHINGTON -- So now we know. The answer to Freud's famous question -- ''What does a woman want?'' -- is: An NTC unattractive statue in the Capitol Rotunda.Of course, not all American women have been heard from. There probably are some in, say, Boise, and maybe others in Muncie, who are unaware that the dignity of their sex is implicated in the controversy about what to do with the cumbersome sculpture of three suffragettes. But this city always echoes with the voices of individuals purporting to speak for people they have not actually consulted.

In a disposable society where today's most popular toy gathers dust tomorrow, are there any gifts that children will cherish until they have children of their own?The answer is yes, though such finds may take a little digging. Some are items that can resist years of battering; others offer TC lifetime interest in a particular hobby or pastime. All of these gifts have the potential for making a lasting impression and, best of all, none of them requires batteries.The Brio train set sold by Early Learning Centres, a British chain store that focuses on preschoolers.

Shopping around was neither the point nor possible when I was growing up. The dime store in the village was the only place to shop.I often walked there after school just to look at what one might buy. In February, the snow lay deep in the ditches, and by the late afternoon, darkness had crept across the fields. The dime store was warm and stuffy, its narrow aisles stretching from a dusty window in front where a mannequin stood draped in taffeta to a long wooden counter in back where the proprietress and her husband rang up purchases on the brass cash register and wrapped them up in string and brown paper to be carried home.