[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S EDITION]
Another friend of mine, the mother of a little girl, has had a different problem, centring around the necessity of books for children, to solve. She, too, lives in the country, and her little girl is a pupil at the neighboring district school. During a visit in the city home of a cousin the small girl had been a spectator at the city child's "school play," which happened to consist of scenes from "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." When she returned home, she wished to have such an entertainment in her school. "Dearest," her mother said, "we have no books of plays children could act."
"Couldn't we do the one they did at Cousin Rose's school?" was the next query. "Papa says we have that."
"I am afraid not," her mother demurred. "Ask your teacher."
The child approached her teacher on the subject. "No," the teacher said decisively. "'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' is too long and too hard. Read it, and you'll see. But," she sagely added, "if you can find anything that is suitable, and can persuade the other children to act in it, I will help you all I can."
That evening, at home, the little girl read "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." "Mamma," she suddenly cried, as she neared the end, "my teacher says this is too long and too hard for us children to do. But we could do the play that the people in it do—don't you think? It is very short, and all the children will like it because it is about poor Pyramus and Thisbe, that we have all read about in school. It isn't just the same as the way it was in the story we read; but it is about them—and the wall, and the lion, and everything! Don't you think we could do it? They did the fairy part when I saw it at Cousin Rose's school, and not this at all. But couldn't we?"
"I did not like to discourage her," my friend said when she related the tale to me. "All the other children were willing and eager to do it, so her teacher couldn't refuse, after what she had said, to help them. I helped with the rehearsals, too, and I doubt if the teacher or I ever laughed so much in all our lives as we did at that time—when there were no children about! The children were so sweet and serious over their play! They acted it as they would have acted a play on the subject of Pyramus and Thisbe written especially for them. They weren't funny. No; they were perfectly lovely. What was so irresistibly comic, of course, was the difference between their performance and one's remembrance of regular performances of it—to say nothing of one's thoughts as to what Shakespeare would have said about it. How those children will laugh when they are grown up! They will have something to laugh at that will last them a lifetime. But poor Shakespeare!"
I did not echo these final words of my friend. For does not Shakespeare rather particularly like to bless us with the laugh that lasts a lifetime, even if—perhaps especially if—it be at our own expense?
Books are such integral parts of the lives of present-day children, especially in America. Their elders appreciate, as possibly the grown- ups of former times did not quite so fully appreciate, the importance of books in the education of the boys and girls. It may even be that we over-emphasize it a bit. We send the children to the book-shelves for help in work and for assistance in play. In effect, we say to them, "Read, that you may be able to mark, learn, and inwardly digest." It is only natural that the boys and girls should read for a hundred reasons, instead of for the one reason of an older day—the pursuit of happiness in the mere reading itself. "How can you sit idly reading a book when there are so many useful things you might be doing?" was the question often put to the children of yesterday by their elders. To-day we feel that the children can hardly do anything likely to prove more useful than reading a book. Is not this because we have taught them, not only to read, but to read for a diversity of reasons?
American children are so familiarly at home in the world of books, it should not surprise us to find them occasionally taking rather a practical, everyday view of some of the things read. A little girl friend of mine chanced to begin her reading of Shakespeare during a winter when her grown-up relatives were spending a large portion of their leisure going to see stage representations of Shakespeare's plays. She therefore heard considerable conversation about the plays, and about the persons acting the chief r˘les in them. It happened that "As You Like It" was one of the comedies being acted. The little girl was invited to go to see it. "Who is going to be Orlando?" she inquired; she had listened to so much talk about who "was," or was "going to be," the various persons in the several dramas!