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bad or the commonplace. The selections in this book are the work of three score and ten writers of distinction, writers of the past ages and of the present time-writers of many lands, who were not writing down to children, but uttering their own best thoughts. This book, like the earlier numbers, may, therefore, be appropriately called Classics, Old and New.

No hard and fast culture-epoch theory has determined their selection, though earnest thought has been given to the interests that appeal to youth at this age. Constant effort has been made to give variety in subject matter, and yet to maintain a unity of appeal to the understanding and the imagination. The subjects chosen range from nature and myth and adventure to biography and patriotism and ethics.

Our material age is coming more and more to neglect poetry as a thing outside the world of reality. The truth is, that there are no more practical things in the world than poetry and music, for they, even more than bread, bring to life what it needs. Many of us can recall poems that have served us as practically in the day's work as have the multiplication tables. The guiding thought in all the poetry selected has been to acquaint the child with the songs that will always be sung-especially the older poems studied by their fathers and mothers before them, -such old and yet ever young treasures as Lord Ullin's Daughter," Gray's "Elegy," "Annabel Lee.”

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The author believes that these readers, in the hands of sympathetic teachers, can be so used as to make not only good readers in the technical sense, but also real lovers of fine literature, young people of good taste in letters and of an increasing desire for close friendship with the best that has been thought and said.

The following acknowledgments are made in addition to those already given in the biographies: to Charles Scribner's Sons for the use of "How I Found Livingstone"; to Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for the use of "Playing Theater at Rivermouth," and to G. P. Putnam's Sons for the use of "A Tradition of Weatherford."

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