Franklin Square Song Collection.
GOOD MUSIC arouses a spirit of good-will, creates a harmonious atmosphere, and where harmony and good-will prevail, the disobedient, turbulent, unruly spirit finds no resting-place. Herbert Spencer puts his final test of any plan of culture in the form of a question, "Does it create a pleasurable excitement in the pupils?" Judged by this criterion, Music deserves the first rank, for no work done in the school room is so surely creative of pleasure as singing. Do we not all agree, then, that Vocal Music has power to benefit every side of the child nature? And in these days, when we seek to make our schools the arenas where children may grow into symmetrical, substantial, noble characters, can we afford to neglect so powerful an aid as Music? Let us as rather encourage it in every way possible.
Nowhere can you find for Home or School a better Selection of Songs and Hymns than in the Franklin Square Song Collection.
Sold Everywhere. Price, 50 cents; Cloth, $1.00. Full contents of the Several Numbers, with Specimen, Pages of favorite Songs and Hymns, sent by Harper & Brothers, New York, to any address.
[THOMAS W. KNOX.]
COLONEL THOMAS W. KNOX.
There are people with whom we never associate the thought of death, and whose bright, genial lives seem meant to go on and on to extreme old age. When they are taken away we hear the tidings with surprise and regret, and looking over the work they have done we realize how much we are in their debt for hours of pleasure and profit. Such a man was Colonel Knox, whose Boy Travellers are in every village library, and whose name is a household word wherever bright young people meet. He was well known to the readers of the Round Table, to which he has often contributed. A cheery comrade, a genial friend, he possessed the rare art of telling a story and imparting information at the same time, so that his books of travel are not only entertaining, but of permanent value. He wrote a great many books, but among them there is not one which has not a claim on the attentive reader; and now that he is gone, we are glad that he will still live, and teach, and amuse, and charm a great audience in his pleasant volumes.
Colonel Knox was born in New Hampshire in 1835. His was a typical American life. Born of plain people, he learned the trade of a shoemaker, having previously gone to the district school and worked on a farm, as many a bright lad is doing to-day. Shoe-making was not to be his occupation, however, and when twenty-three years old he undertook the more congenial task of teaching, and presently was at the head of a school. Later his love of adventure took him to the gold-fields of the West. But for the breaking out of the civil war it is probable that young Knox might have gone on either as an explorer or a preceptor, but fate decreed otherwise. When the war rallied the young men of the country on one or the other side, the most promising in every avocation enlisted, and as a matter of course such a man as Knox entered the Union army. Here he served in two campaigns, was rapidly promoted, and finally received the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel on the staff of the Governor of California. That he could write as well as fight was shown by the fact that he became a war correspondent, sending stirring letters from the front to the New York papers.
All this proves the pluck and versatility of the man. He was generally successful in his undertakings, bringing to bear on them the force of a clever and quick mind which could grasp a situation and did not neglect details.
There must have been a roving drop in the blood of the New Hampshire boy, for after the war he could not contentedly settle down and enjoy life at home, but started off on a journey with a scientific object. Organizing an expedition to establish a telegraph line through southern Asia, he entered on the life of a traveller, with all the hardships and the pleasures which combine to make such a life interesting and full of excitement. On sledges in Siberia, in palanquins in India, up and down rivers in China, wherever his fancy or business led him. Colonel Knox travelled, and wrote books about his experiences. The Emperor of Siam was so pleased with the story of Boy Travellers in his country that he conferred on the author the "Order of the White Elephant," a great distinction, which Colonel Knox was the first American to receive.
Colonel Knox was very practical, not specially imaginative, a clear-sighted, straight-forward man, noted for common-sense and energy. As the boys whom he has so often entertained turn the pages of their favorite volumes, they cannot do better than remember that the man who wrote them was in every throb of the pulse an American, simple-hearted, patriotic, and sincere. He loved his country, he studied other countries, and he spent his life in doing honestly and manfully whatever his hand found to do. A good example for us all.