t might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression
on me whatever. I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general
adventures.

I think there ought to be children's books. I think that the child will
like grown-up books also, and I do not believe a child's book is really
good unless grown-ups 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. Richard's "Nursery Rhymes." My own children loved them dearly,
and their mother and I loved them almost equally; the delightfully
light-hearted "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 adventu