Boy Life: Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells

Stories and Readings Selected from the Works of William Dean Howells , and Arranged by Percival Chubb , Director of English in the Ethical Culture School, New York. "The literary culture which we are trying to give our boys and girls is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not sufficiently national and American.... "Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a more distinctively American savor than that of William Dean Howells.... The juvenile books of Mr. Howells' contain some of the very best pages ever written for the enjoyment of young people."— Percival Chubb. ( Others in Preparation. ) HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK Copyright, 1909, by Harper & Brothers . All rights reserved. Published September, 1909. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction ix I. Adventures in a Boy's Town HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS 3 THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN 13 JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE 23 II. Life in a Boy's Town THE TOWN 41 EARLIEST MEMORIES 45 HOME LIFE 47 THE RIVER 51 SWIMMING 55 SKATING 61 MANNERS AND CUSTOMS 64 GIRLS 68 MOTHERS 69 A BROTHER 73 A FRIEND 79 III. Games and Pastimes MARBLES 89 RACES 91 A MEAN TRICK 93 TOPS 96 KITES 98 THE BUTLER GUARDS 103 PETS 108 INDIANS 124 GUNS 129 NUTTING 138 THE FIRE-ENGINES 145 IV. Glimpses of the Larger World THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS 151 PASSING SHOWS 163 THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN 168 THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS 171 V. The Last of a Boy's Town 183 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE KITE-TIME Frontispiece HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THE VERY NEXT MORNING 5 THE FIRST LOCK 43 THE BUTLER GUARDS 105 ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE 127 NUTTING 141 INTRODUCTION There are two conspicuous faults in the literary culture which we are trying to give to our boys and girls in our elementary and secondary schools: it is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not sufficiently national and American. Hence it lacks vitality and actuality. So little of it is carried over into life because so little of it is interpretative of the life that is. It is associated too exclusively in the child's mind with things dead and gone—with the Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere, the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively recent national interest, it takes the…