HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY JULY 10, 1940 Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1842, by CLEMENT AND PACKARD, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. PREFACE. EXCITING Stories, have, during our own times, entered widely into the literature for unfolding minds. Yet, among reflecting parents and teachers, who feel that a right education is peculiarly the safe-guard of our country, there is an increasing demand for works founded on solidity of principle, and which present knowledge, and morality, without the disguise of fiction. In compliance with this demand, the present volume has been prepared, containing lessons of republican simplicity, of the value of time,-of the rewards of virtue, of the duties of this life, as they take hold on the happiness of the next. These objects have been kept in view, in the composition both of its prose and poetry, and throughout the varied forms of narrative, biography, and didactic essay. Though adapted by the nature of its plan, and division, as a reading-book for schools, it does not limit itself to the sphere of an assistant, in the art of Elocution. The writer hopes that it may sometimes be a companion of the child, who, loving truth for its own sake, voluntarily devotes a part of his le sure, to what is useful, and sits in the long winter evenings, reading aloud to his mother, by the quiet fireside. Sons of my people, this book has been constructed for you, carefully, and with pleasure. May it bear on its pages, a blessing to you, who now, under the discipline of education, will so soon emerge from its tutelage, to take the places of the fathers. Then, may you stand forth, amid the green vales, and broad prairies of our native land, like the olive, cheering and enriching those around,-like the oak, transmitting its honours to a future age-like the blessed tree, "whose leaves are for the healing of the nations." L. H. S. HARTFORD CONN. |