I think there ought to be children’s books. I think that the child will like grownup books also, and I do not believe a child’s book is really good unless grownups get something out of it. For instance, there is a book I did not have when I was a child because it was not written. It is Laura E. Richards’s Nursery Rhymes. My own children loved them dearly, and their mother and I loved them almost equally; the delightfully lighthearted “Man from New Mexico who Lost his Grandmother out in the Snow,” the adventures of “The Owl, the Eel, and the Warming-Pan,” and the extraordinary genealogy of the kangaroo whose “father was a whale with a feather in his tail who lived in the Greenland sea,” while “his mother was a shark who kept very dark in the Gulf of Caribee.”
As a small boy I had Our Young Folks, which I then firmly believed to be the very best magazine in the world—a belief, I may add, which I have kept to this day unchanged, for I seriously doubt if any magazine for old or young has ever surpassed it. Both my wife and I have the bound volumes of Our Young Folks which we preserved from our youth. I have tried to read again the Mayne Reid books which I so dearly loved as a boy, only to find, alas! that it is impossible. But I really believe that I enjoy going over Our Young Folks now nearly as much as ever. “Cast Away in the Cold,” “Grandfather’s Struggle for a Homestead,” “The William Henry Letters,” and a dozen others like them were first-class, good healthy stories, interesting in the first place, and in the next place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct. At the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls’ stories—“Pussy Willow” and “A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life,” just as I worshiped Little Men and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.
This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling in such tales of adventure as Ballantyne’s stories, or Marryat’s Midshipman Easy. I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as a child there were books which I ought to have liked and did not. For instance, I never cared at all for the first part of Robinson Crusoe (and although it is unquestionably the best part, I do not care for it now); whereas the second part, containing the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and out in the Far East, simply fascinated me. What I did like in the first part were the adventures before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sallee Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their improbable bath in the ocean. Thanks to being already an embryo zoologist, I disliked the Swiss Family Robinson because of the wholly impossible collection of animals met by that worthy family as they ambled inland from the wreck. Even in poetry it was the relation of adventures that most appealed to me as a boy. At a pretty early age I began to read certain books of poetry, notably Longfellow’s poem, “The Saga of King Olaf,” which absorbed me. This introduced me to Scandinavian literature; and I have never lost my interest in and affection for it.
Among my first books was a volume of a hopelessly unscientific kind by Mayne Reid, about mammals, illustrated with pictures no more artistic than but quite as thrilling as those in the typical school geography. When my father found how deeply interested I was in this not very accurate volume, he gave me a little book by J. G. Wood, the English writer of popular books on natural history, and then a larger one of his called Homes Without Hands. Both of these were cherished possessions. They were studied eagerly; and they finally descended to my children. The Homes Without Hands, by the way, grew to have an added association in connection with a pedagogical failure on my part. In accordance with what I believed was some kind of modern theory of making education interesting and not letting it become a task, I endeavored to teach my eldest small boy one or two of his letters from the titlepage. As the letter H appeared in the title an unusual number of times, I selected that to begin on, my effort being to keep the small boy interested, not to let him realize that he was learning a lesson, and to convince him that he was merely having a good time. Whether it was the theory or my method of applying it that was defective I do not know,
