Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

i

Not that age has anything to do with it. A man is as young as he feels and a woman is as young as her imagination keeps her. The idea of never growing up is a mistake. Everyone wants to grow up, but that’s no reason for not keeping youthful.

There’s something in fellows like Irvin S. Cobb and Owen Johnson and Ralph Henry Barbour which is just as good at forty as at fourteen—maybe better. And there’s something in books like Little Women that you keep coming back to....

S’pose we’d better begin with the Bedtime Story Man. Half the children in the United States of America are willing to call it a day when Thornton W. Burgess says the word. Mr. Burgess owes his success to the fact that he was born in a place called Sandwich in the State of Massachusetts. It made him realize that something was needed “between the dark and the daylight,” as Longfellow said. Having splendid eyesight and some excellent connections, he was able to enter the best animal circles, and early met Peter Rabbit, Lightfoot the Deer, and loads of others. The way to meet them is by all means under Mr. Burgess’s auspices, in The Burgess Animal Book for Children. Sammy Jay, Bob White and the feathered companions who have more or less dealings with Striped Chipmunk and Johnny Chuck are introduced in The Burgess Bird Book for Children. It is a point of honor with Mr. Burgess always to let his animal friends tell their own stories. Louis Agassiz Fuertes illustrates these books with pictures in full colors. For example, he shows fifty-eight birds in all their glory. The Burgess Bird Book for Children brought cries of joy from Dr. W. T. Hornaday, who is America’s leading naturalist and who presides over more animals at the New York Zoo than went into the ark with Noah. But wait! Here’s a third volume to put with these two, The Burgess Flower Book for Children, also illustrated in color and black and white and showing 103 flowers. You should see the color pictures, for instance, of the yellow adder’s-tongue and the wild columbine! Let it be stressed: the books by Burgess are the most popular and most successful published for little children. Their interest and joy is communicable to the child of four years—and they are read and re-read by boys and girls up to twelve, and sometimes by their elders.

Rose Fyleman, with Fairies and Chimneys, The Fairy Flute, and The Fairy Green, won some time ago chief honors as the children’s poet; and now she seems to be on the path to distinguished honors for her prose stories. The Rainbow Cat, whose color scheme included orange hind legs and a red, red tail, gave the greatest satisfaction, and so will Forty Good Night Tales, in which errant fairies explain themselves. But probably the most ambitious book is the new Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book. Rose Fyleman for fairies, as the advertisers would say.

Did you see Number One Joy Street, ever? At any rate, you will see Number Two Joy Street, won’t you? Like the first book, it has a jolly cover and endpapers, and plenty of illustrations in color and otherwise. The collection of prose and verse for boys and girls in Number Two Joy Street is from writers whose names will make even older people prick up their ears—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Hilaire Belloc, Hugh Walpole, Laurence Housman and Rose Fyleman are some of them. With such an array of contributors, you will have very hard work to keep your copy of this book for your very own. It will be necessary to speak nicely but firmly to older people.

You will also need to explain that you must be left alone with Edna Geister’s new book, What Shall We Play. Grownups are almost certain to think that they ought to stick around and tell you how to go about the fifty best games in this book. They are wrong. Miss Geister herself says so. She says she took the very best out of her hundreds of inspirations for play and took pains to explain them so that children can play them without help or direction, and at sight. Let’s Play is another one of her game books written especially for boys and girls. It Is To Laugh is a little more grown-up (not a great deal).

The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, has remarkable pictures. As you look at William Nicholson’s drawings (they were made on stone, which gives them their peculiar texture) you can really see the sawdust hero come to life and leap for joy! We will come in a moment to other books with glorious pictures, but first let us see if we have one or two more books for four and five and six years. Yes. Here is Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard, by Maude Radford Warren and Eve Davenport, who also wrote Tales Told by the Gander and Adventures in the Old Woman’s Shoe. The scheme in each of these books is the delightful one of continuing the Mother Goose stories. Mother Goose, with her unfinished tales, is extremely tantalizing. Probably the good woman told all she knew, but it is by no means enough. For instance, she appeared to know nothing of the circumstances in which Mother Hubbard acquired her dog. They were highly interesting. You see, she needed some one to work for and be interested in, and as no child was available she took Diccon, who was a trained, performing dog attached to a circus, but so ill that his owner thought he wouldn’t live long anyway. C. A. Federer has made the many illustrations, some of them in color.

The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories, by Mabel Marlowe, is another book with many pictures that is full of the fun of clever animals, brownies, and their kin.

Perhaps you take part in plays? Then, if you are young enough, I think you will be enthusiastic over the seven gay masques in The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays, by John Farrar. There is probably a place in the garden that looks as though a play were about to begin there, or a spot down the meadow or a roomy chimney-corner in the house. Home-made music and costumes, please!

For seriousness, and in moments when you want to know more about the world you live in, and how men came to live in it, anyway, the two most helpful books are likely to be Frederic Arnold Kummer’s The First Days of Man and The First Days of Knowledge. These relate the true fairy story of Creation and man’s coming-to-know. Moreover, it is told in such a way that any boy and most girls can make for themselves the simple tools that man first began by making.