Junior High School Literature, Book 1

BY WILLIAM H. ELSON AUTHOR ELSON READERS AND GOOD ENGLISH SERIES
AND
CHRISTINE M. KECK HEAD UNION JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH, GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN
SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY CHICAGO ATLANTA NEW YORK

Copyright 1919 By Scott, Foresman and Company
For permission to use copyrighted material grateful acknowledgment is made to The London Times for “The Guards Came Through” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; to Thomas Hardy for “Men Who March Away” from The London Times ; to John Galsworthy for “England to Free Men” from The Westminster Gazette ; to John Masefield for “Spanish Waters”; to Hamlin Garland for “The Great Blizzard” from Boy Life on the Prairie ; to Doubleday Page & Co. for “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry; to G. P. Putnam’s Sons for “Old Ephraim, the Grizzly Bear,” from The Wilderness Hunter by Theodore Roosevelt; to the George H. Doran Company for “Trees” from Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer; to Mr. R. W. Lillard for “America’s Answer” from The New York Evening Post ; to Horace Traubel for “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”, “I Hear America Singing”, “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman; to Charles Scribner’s Sons for “On a Florida River” by Sidney Lanier, from The Lanier Book , copyright 1904; and to Frederick A. Stokes Company for “Kilmeny—A Song of the Trawlers” by Alfred Noyes from The New Morning , copyright 1919.
ROBERT O. LAW COMPANY EDITION BOOK MANUFACTURERS CHICAGO, U. S. A.

The Junior High School offers exceptional opportunity for relating literature to life. In addition to the aesthetic and ethical purposes, long recognized in the study of literature, the World War emphasized the need for an extension of aims to include the teaching of certain fundamental American ideals. To marshal the available material, setting it to work in the service of social and civic ideals, is to give to literature the “central place in a new humanism.” When we organize reading in the schools with reference to the teaching of ideals—personal, social, national, and patriotic—we “put the stress on literature as one of the chief means through which the child enters on his intellectual and spiritual inheritance.” Outstanding among these ideals are: freedom, love of home and country, service, loyalty, courage, thrift, humane treatment of animals, a sense of humor, love of Nature, and an appreciation of the dignity of honest work. In a word, to provide a course in the history and development of civilization, particularly stressing America’s part in it, is the present-day demand on the school.