To H.C.A. IN REMEMBRANCE OF GLADNESS GIVEN TO SORROWFUL LITTLE LIVES “The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,The young birds are chirping in the nest,The young fawns are playing with the shadows,The young flowers are blowing toward the west–But the young; young children, O my brothers,They are weeping bitterly!They are weeping in the playtime […]

“See how each boy, excited by the actual event, is all ear.”–Froebel. There it hangs, on a corner of the picture frame, very much as it hung in the old willow-tree out in the garden. It was spring time, and I used to move my rocking-chair up to the window, where I could lean out […]

Adapted From Ouida. “The story-teller must take life into himself in its wholeness, must let it live and work whole and free within him. He must give it out free and unabbreviated, and yet STAND ABOVE THE LIFE which actually is.”–Froebel. In a little brown house, far, far away in Germany, there lived a father […]

ADAPTED FROM MRS. EWING. “With the genuine story-teller the inner life of the genuine listener is roused; he is carried out of himself, and he thereby measures himself.”–FROEBEL. Benjy was a very naughty, disagreeable boy! It is sad to say it, but it is truth. He always had a cloudy, smudgy, slovenly look, like a […]

[Footnote: The plan of this story was suggested to me many years ago; so many, indeed, that I cannot now remember whether it was my friend’s own, or whether he had read something like it in German.–K. D. W.] “This standing above life, and yet grasping life, and being stirred by life, is what makes […]

“In order to be especially beneficial and effective, story-telling should be connected with the events and occurrences of life.”– Froebel. Dicky Smiley was eight years old when all these things happened that I am going to tell you; eight years old, and as bright as a steel button. It was very funny that his name […]

OUR FROGGERY. “Turn back observantly into your own youth, and awaken, warm, and vivify the eternal youth of your mind.”–FROEBEL. When I was a little girl my sister and I lived in the country. She was younger than I, and the dearest, fattest little toddlekins of a sister you ever knew. She always wanted to […]

“See what joyous faces, what shining eyes, and what glad jubilee welcome the story-teller, and what a blooming circle of glad children press around him!”–FROEBEL. Mrs. Chinchilla was not a lovely lady, with a dress of soft gray cloth and a great chinchilla muff and boa. Not at all. Mrs. Chinchilla was a beautiful cat, […]

I am heartily interested in the Girl Scouts of America. The fact is, I think I was always a Girl Scout myself (although the name was unknown); yes, from the very beginning. Even my first youthful story was “scouty” in tone, if I may invent a word. Then for a few years afterward, when I […]

The giant elm stood in the centre of the squire’s fair green meadows, and was known to all the country round about as the “Bean ellum.” The other trees had seemingly retired to a respectful distance, as if they were not worthy of closer intimacy; and so it stood alone, king of the meadow, monarch […]

Diadema, wife of Jot Bascom, was sitting at the window of the village watch-tower, so called because it commanded a view of nearly everything that happened in Pleasant River; those details escaping the physical eye being supplied by faith and imagination working in the light of past experience. She sat in the chair of honor, […]

I. “Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,Know more than any book.Down with your doleful problems,And court the sunny brook.The south-winds are quick-witted,The schools are sad and slow,The masters quite omittedThe lore we care to know.” Emerson’s April. “Find the 317th page, Davy, and begin at the top of the right-hand column.” The boy turned the leaves of […]

In the little villages along the Saco River, in the year 1850 or thereabouts, the arrival and departure of the stage-coach was the one exciting incident of the day. It did not run on schedule time in those days, but started from Limington or Saco, as the case might be, at about or somewhere near […]

The sky is a shadowless blue; the noon-day sun glows fiercely; a cloud of dust rises from the burning road whenever the hot breeze stirs the air, or whenever a farm wagon creaks along, its wheels sinking into the deep sand. In the distance, where the green of the earth joins the blue of the […]

It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house, with its weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles. It was in the very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost knock on the window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare occasions when he […]

TO MY BOSTON FRIEND SALEMINA NO ANGLOMANIAC, BUT A TRUE BRITON SHE WINCHESTER, May 28, 1891 The Royal Garden Inn. We are doing the English cathedral towns, aunt Celia and I. Aunt Celia has an intense desire to improve my mind. Papa told her, when we were leaving Cedarhurst, that he wouldn’t for the world […]

CHAPTER I. THORNYCROFT FARM, near Barbury Green, July 1, 190-. In alluding to myself as a Goose Girl, I am using only the most modest of my titles; for I am also a poultry-maid, a tender of Belgian hares and rabbits, and a shepherdess; but I particularly fancy the role of Goose Girl, because it […]

To The Three Dearest Children in the World, BERTHA, LUCY, AND HORATIO. “O little ones, ye cannot know The power with which ye plead, Nor why, as on through life we go, The little child doth lead.” CONTENTS I. A LITTLE SNOW-BIRD II. DROOPING WINGS III. THE BIRD’S NEST IV. “BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK […]

A long, busy street in San Francisco. Innumerable small shops lined it from north to south; horse cars, always crowded with passengers, hurried to and fro; narrow streets intersected the broader one, these built up with small dwellings, most of them rather neglected by their owners. In the middle distance other narrow streets and alleys […]

PREFACE More than a dozen years ago musical scholars and critics began to illuminate the musical darkness of New York with lecture-recitals explanatory of the more abstruse German operas. Previous to this era no one had ever thought, for instance, of unfolding the story, or the “Leit motive” (if there happened to be any!), in […]