explain the text, but to further the child's interest in the author and the selection. At the end of each book will be found suggestions to teachers. These have been made unusually concrete and full in the desire to throw increased light on the teaching of this, the most important subject in the school curriculum. It is hoped that a measure of success has attended the undertaking, and that teachers and pupils to whom the books may come will take new joy in their work. It is a pleasure to thank Miss Nebraska Cropsey, Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Indianapolis, for suggestions concerning the teaching of reading covering a period of twenty years; Miss Adelaide Baylor, Superintendent of Schools at Wabash, who has carefully read the text and made valuable criticisms, and the many teachers who have tested the books in their classes. G. A. Acknowledgment is made for permission to use selections from the writings of William Morris, to Longmans, Green and Company; of Leo Tolstoy, to Lothrop, Lee and Shepard; of Meredith Nicholson, to the Macmillan Company; of Maurice Maeterlinck, to Dodd, Mead & Company; of Abraham Lincoln, to the Century Company; of Joaquin Miller, from the 1909 edition, to the Whitaker & Ray Company; of Walt Whitman, to Mr. Horace Traubel; of Robert Louis Stevenson, James M. Barrie and Henry van Dyke, to Charles Scribner's Sons; of Lew Wallace, to Harper & Brothers; of Rudyard Kipling, to the author; of Helen Hunt Jackson, to Little, Brown & Company; for the poems, March and To a Waterfowl from Bryant's Complete Poetical Works, to D. Appleton & Company; also for an illustration from Sweetser's Boys and Girls from George Eliot, to Duffield & Company, and for an illustration from Don Quixote, to John Lane Company. The selections from the writings of James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Townsend Trowbridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Burroughs, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edward Rowland Sill and Eva March Tappan are used by special arrangement with Houghton, Mifflin & Company. VI Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. Ralph Waldo Emerson. |