The American Child Part 12

"Yes," I said; "your book was written from this book, and some of those other little red books there with it in the bookcase."

The child went back to the bookcase. She took down all the other volumes of Shakespeare, and, sitting on the rug with them, she spent an utterly absorbed hour in turning over their leaves. Finally she scrambled to her feet and set the books back in their places. "I've found which stories in these books are in my book, too," she remarked. "Mine are easier to read," she added; "but yours have lovely talk in them!"

Had she not read Lambs' "Tales" at eight I am not certain she would have ventured into the wide realms of Shakespeare at nine, and tarried there long enough to discover that in those realms there is "lovely talk."

Occasionally, to be sure, the children insist upon books being easy to read, and refuse to find "lovely talk" in them if they are not. It was only a short time ago that I read to a little boy Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin." When I had finished there was a silence. "Do you like it?"

I inquired.

"Ye-es," replied my small friend; "it's a nice story, but it's nicer in my book than in yours. I'll bring it next time I come, so you can read it."

He did. The story was told in prose. It began, "There was once a town, named Hamelin, and there were so many rats in it that the people did not know what to do." Certainly this is "easier to read" than the forty-two lines which the poem uses to make an identical statement regarding the town named Hamelin. My little friend is only six. I hope that by the time he is twelve he will think the poem is as "nice" as, if not "nicer"

than, the story in his book. At least he may be impelled by the memory of his pleasure in his book to turn to my book and compare the two versions of the tale.

The children of to-day, like the children of former days, read because they find in books such stuff as dreams are made of; and, in common with the children of all times, they must needs make dreams. Like the boys and girls of most eras, they desire to make also other, more temporal, things. To aid them in this there are books in quant.i.ties and of qualities not even imagined by the children of a few generations ago.

The book the t.i.tle of which begins with the words "How to Make" is perhaps the most distinctive product of the present-day publishing house. No other type of book can so effectively win to a love for reading a child who seems indifferent to books; who, as a boy friend of mine used to say, "would rather hammer in nails than read." The "How to Make" books tell such a boy how to hammer in nails to some purpose. I happened to see recently a volume called "Boys' Make-at-Home Things."

With much curiosity I turned its pages,--pages ill.u.s.trated with pictures of the make-at-home things of the t.i.tle,--glancing at directions for constructing a weather-vane, a tent, a sled, and a mult.i.tude of smaller articles. I thought of my boyfriend. "Do you think he would care to have the book?" I inquired of his mother over the telephone.

"Well, I _wish_ he would care to have _any_ book!" she replied. "If you want to _try_ this one--" She left the sentence unfinished, unless a sigh may be regarded as a conclusion.

I did try the book. "This will tell you how to have fun with your tools," I wrote, when I sent it to the boy.

Except for a laconic note of thanks, I heard nothing from my young friend about the book. One day last week I chanced to see his mother.

"What do you think I am doing this afternoon?" she said. "I am getting a _book_ for my son, at his own request! He is engrossed in that book you sent him. He is making some of the things described in it. But he wants to make something _not_ mentioned in it, and he actually asked me to see if I could find a book that told how!"

"So he likes books better now?" I commented.

"Well--I asked him if he did," said the boy's mother; "and he said he didn't like '_booky_' books any better, but he liked this kind, and always would have, if he'd known about them!"

Whether my boy friend will learn early to love "booky" books is a bit doubtful perhaps; certainly, however, he has found a companion in one kind of book. He has made the discovery quickly, too; for he has had "Boys' Make-at-Home Things" less than a month.

It was an easy matter for that boy's mother to get for her son the particular book he desired. She lives in a city; at least three large public libraries are open to her. As for book-shops, there are more within her reach than she could possibly visit in the course of a week, much less in an afternoon.

The mothers who live in the country cannot so conveniently secure the books their boys and girls may wish or need. I know one woman, the mother of two boys, living in the country, who has to exercise considerable ingenuity to provide her sons with books of the "How to Make" kind. There is no public library within available distance of the farmhouse which is her home, and she and her husband cannot afford to buy many books for their children. The boys, moreover, like so great a variety of books that, in order to please them, it is not necessary to select a book that is not "booky." Their parents are lovers of great literature. "I cannot bring myself to buy a book about how to make an aeroplane, for instance," their mother said to me one day, "when there are so many wonderful books they have not read, and would enjoy reading!

Since I must limit my purchase of books, I really think I ought to choose only the _real_ books for the boys; and yet they want to make things with their hands, like other boys, and there is no way to teach them how except through books. My husband has no time for it, and there is no one else to show them."

The next summer I went to spend a few days with my friend in the country. The morning after my arrival her boys proposed to take me "over the place." At the lower edge of the garden, to which we presently came, there was a little brook. Across it was a bridge. It was plainly to be seen that this bridge was the work of the boys. "How very nice it is!" I remarked.

"We made it," the older of the boys instantly replied.

"Who showed you how?" I queried, wondering, as I spoke, if my friend had, after all, changed her mind with respect to the selection of books for her children, and chosen one "How to Make" volume.

"It told how in a book," the younger boy said; "a Latin book father studied out of when he was a boy. There was a picture of the bridge; and on the pages in the back of the book the way to make it was all written out in English--father had done it when he was in school. It was a long time before we could _quite_ see how to do it; but mother helped, and the picture showed how, and father thought we could do it if we kept at it. And it is really a good bridge--you can walk across on it."

When the boys and I returned to the house my friend greeted me with a merry smile. As soon as we were alone she exclaimed, "I have _so_ wanted to write to you about our bridge, patterned on Caesar's! But the boys are so proud of it, they like to 'surprise' people with it--not because it is like a bridge Caesar made, but because it is a bridge they have made themselves!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHILDREN'S EDITION]

Another friend of mine, the mother of a little girl, has had a different problem, centring around the necessity of books for children, to solve.

She, too, lives in the country, and her little girl is a pupil at the neighboring district school. During a visit in the city home of a cousin the small girl had been a spectator at the city child's "school play,"

which happened to consist of scenes from "A Midsummer-Night's Dream."

When she returned home, she wished to have such an entertainment in her school. "Dearest," her mother said, "we have no books of plays children could act."

"Couldn't we do the one they did at Cousin Rose's school?" was the next query. "Papa says we have _that_."

"I am afraid not," her mother demurred. "Ask your teacher."

The child approached her teacher on the subject. "No," the teacher said decisively. "'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' is too long and too hard. Read it, and you'll see. But," she sagely added, "if you can find anything that is suitable, and can persuade the other children to act in it, I will help you all I can."

That evening, at home, the little girl read "A Midsummer-Night's Dream."

"Mamma," she suddenly cried, as she neared the end, "my teacher says this is too long and too hard for us children to do. But we _could_ do the play that the people _in it_ do--don't you think? It is _very_ short, and all the children will like it because it is about poor Pyramus and Thisbe, that we have all read about in school. It isn't _just_ the same as the way it was in the story we read; but it is about them--and the wall, and the lion, and everything! Don't you think we could do it? They did the fairy part when I saw it at Cousin Rose's school, and not this at all. But couldn't _we_?"

"I did not like to discourage her," my friend said when she related the tale to me. "_All_ the other children were willing and eager to do it, so her teacher couldn't refuse, after what she had said, to help them. I helped with the rehearsals, too, and I doubt if the teacher or I ever laughed so much in all our lives as we did at that time--when there were no children about! The children were so sweet and serious over their play! They acted it as they would have acted a play on the subject of Pyramus and Thisbe written especially for them. _They_ weren't funny.

No; they were perfectly lovely. What was so irresistibly comic, of course, was the difference between their performance and one's remembrance of regular performances of it--to say nothing of one's thoughts as to what Shakespeare would have said about it. How those children will laugh when they are grown up! They will have something to laugh at that will last them a lifetime. But _poor_ Shakespeare!"

I did not echo these final words of my friend. For does not Shakespeare rather particularly like to bless us with the laugh that lasts a lifetime, even if--perhaps especially if--it be at our own expense?

Books are such integral parts of the lives of present-day children, especially in America. Their elders appreciate, as possibly the grown- ups of former times did not quite so fully appreciate, the importance of books in the education of the boys and girls. It may even be that we over-emphasize it a bit. We send the children to the book-shelves for help in work and for a.s.sistance in play. In effect, we say to them, "Read, that you may be able to mark, learn, and inwardly digest." It is only natural that the boys and girls should read for a hundred reasons, instead of for the one reason of an older day--the pursuit of happiness in the mere reading itself. "How can you sit idly reading a book when there are so many useful things you might be doing?" was the question often put to the children of yesterday by their elders. To-day we feel that the children can hardly do anything likely to prove more useful than reading a book. Is not this because we have taught them, not only to read, but to read for a diversity of reasons?

American children are so familiarly at home in the world of books, it should not surprise us to find them occasionally taking rather a practical, everyday view of some of the things read. A little girl friend of mine chanced to begin her reading of Shakespeare during a winter when her grown-up relatives were spending a large portion of their leisure going to see stage representations of Shakespeare's plays.

She therefore heard considerable conversation about the plays, and about the persons acting the chief roles in them. It happened that "As You Like It" was one of the comedies being acted. The little girl was invited to go to see it. "Who is going to be Orlando?" she inquired; she had listened to so much talk about who "was," or was "going to be," the various persons in the several dramas!

"But," she objected, when she was informed, "I think I've heard you say he is not very tall. Orlando was _such_ a tall man!"

"Was he?" I ventured, coming in at that moment. "I don't remember that about him. Who told you he was tall?"

"Why, it is in the book!" she exclaimed.

Every one present besought her to mention where.

"Don't you remember?" she said incredulously. "He says Rosalind is just as high as his heart; that wouldn't be _quite_ up to his shoulder. And she says she is _more than common_ tall! So he must have been _'specially_ tall. Don't you remember?" she asked again, looking perplexedly at our blank faces.

There are so many bonds of understanding between American children of the present time and their grown-up relatives and friends. Is not one of the best of these that which has come out of our national impulse toward giving the boys and girls the books we love, "cut small"; and showing them how to read those books as we read the larger books from which they are made? "What kinds of books do American children read?" foreigners inquire. We are able to reply, "The same kinds that grown-up Americans read." "And why do they read them?" may be the next question. Again we can answer, "For much the same reasons that the grown-ups read them."

"How do they use the libraries?" might be the next query. Still we could say, "As grown people use them." And if yet another query, "Why?" be put, we might reply, "Because, unlike any other children in the world, American children are almost as completely 'exposed to books' as are their elders."

VI

THE CHILD IN CHURCH

Within the past few months, I have had the privilege of looking over the answers sent by men and women--most of them fathers and mothers--living in many sections of the United States, in response to an examination paper containing among other questions this one: "Should church-going on the part of children be compulsory or voluntary?" In almost every case the answer was, "It should be voluntary." In practically all instances the reason given was, "Worship, like love, is at its best only when it is a free-will offering."

It was not a surprise to read again and again, in longer or in shorter form, such an answer, based upon such a reason. The religious liberty of American children of the present day is perhaps the most salient fact of their lives. Without doubt, the giving to them of this liberty is the most remarkable fact in the lives of their elders. No grown people were ever at any time willingly allowed to exercise such freedom in matters pertaining to religion as are the children of our nation at the present time. Not only is churchgoing not compulsory; religion itself is voluntary.

A short while ago a little girl friend of mine was showing me her birthday gifts. Among them was a Bible. It was a beautiful book, bound in soft crimson leather, the child's name stamped on it in gold.