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Preface.
A preface to a little book of this sort is an anomaly. Consequently it should be understood the sooner that these fore-words are not intended for any boys or girls that take up Left to Themselves. It is solely for the benefit of the adult reader led by curiosity or carefulness to open the book. The young reader will use his old privilege and skip it.
It was lately observed, with a good deal of truth, that childhood and youth in their relations to literature are modern discoveries. To compare reading for the boys or girls of today with that purveyed even twenty-five years ago, in quantity and quality, is a trite superfluity.
But it has begun to look as if catering to this discovery of what young minds relish and of what they absorb has gone incautiously far. There exists a good measure of forgetfulness that children, after all is said, are little men and little women, with hearts and heads, as well as merely imaginations to be tickled. Undoubtedly these last must he stirred in the story. But there is always a large element of the young reading public to whom character in fiction, and a definite idea of human nature through fiction, and the impression of downright personality through fiction, are the main interests—perhaps unconsciously—and work a charm and influence good or bad in a very high degree. A child does not always live in and care for the eternal story, story, story, incident, incident, incident, of literature written for him. There are plenty of philosophers not yet arrived at tail-coats or long frocks. They sit in the corners of the library or school-room. They think out and feel the personality in narrative deeply. This element, apart from incident, in a story means far more to impress and hold