The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys, by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Illustrated by Walter Crane

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Title: A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Release Date: May 3, 2010 [eBook #32242]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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A WONDER BOOK FOR GIRLS & BOYS

[Illustration]

by

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

With 60 Designs by Walter Crane

Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company

[Illustration: BELLEROPHON ON PEGASVS]

Copyright, 1851, by Nathaniel
Hawthorne

Copyright, 1879, by Rose Hawthorne
Lathrop

Copyright, 1883 and 1892, by
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

All Rights Reserved

PREFACE

[Illustration]

The author has long been of opinion that many of the classical myths
were capable of being rendered into very capital reading for children.
In the little volume here offered to the public, he has worked up half
a dozen of them, with this end in view. A great freedom of treatment
was necessary to his plan; but it will be observed by every one who
attempts to render these legends malleable in his intellectual
furnace, that they are marvellously independent of all temporary modes
and circumstances. They remain essentially the same, after changes
that would affect the identity of almost anything else.

He does not, therefore, plead guilty to a sacrilege, in having
sometimes shaped anew, as his