“That there’s Brer Rabbit,” he was beginning, when Alice interrupted to say, “You can’t say ‘that there.’” “Yes, I can,” he retorted, “I’ve just said it.” Alice saw he was hopeless, like all boys, and paid no further attention to his grammar, while Nils discussed the creatures, both wild and tame, all about. Some grazed peacefully, some were frisking and playing, and a few gyred and gimbled in the wabe like the slithy toves Alice had heard her friend, Mr. Lewis Carroll, tell about. Brer Rabbit didn’t in the least resemble the White Rabbit, being brown in colour and having no vest pocket with a watch and chain. Uncle Remus and Uncle Remus’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, kept tabs on Brer Rabbit. Forrestine C. Hooker was feeding lumps of sugar to the Comanche pony named Star that she has written about in Star: The Story of an Indian Pony, and Prince Jan, the St. Bernard of her other book, stood gravely by her. Ernest Thompson Seton, looking more wild than his wildest animals, was racing about, trying to keep track of his grey squirrel, Bannertail, of Krag and Randy and Johnny Bear and Chink, of Lobo, Rag and Vixen, and especially of the Sandhill Stag. “It’s the hardest work,” he assured Alice, stopping for a moment to subdue his hair and wipe his forehead, “to observe all their habits. I simply couldn’t ever do it if I didn’t have wide margins in my books and make a little drawing whenever I noted a new habit. Bad habits in the lefthand margins, good habits in the righthand margins.” “But,” said Alice, wonderingly, “the drawings all look alike to me.” “You might as well say all animals look alike to you,” said Mr. Seton, impatiently. “But they don’t know good and bad, though; all they know is habits. Now, if children only had habits they would be as interesting as animals.” “I’m sure I don’t know,” answered Alice, doubtfully.
Nils had disappeared and the White Queen was nowhere in sight, either. “It’s a strange place,” thought Alice. “It is, indeed,” said a man who was busy painting magnificent pictures in most glowing colours. “It’s strange because no one ever stays long enough to bore you.” “Oh, is that it?” Alice answered. But she was really much impressed. She looked at the gorgeous paintings, each signed “N. C. Wyeth” and each outdoing the one before. She thought with secret ecstasy: “I’m only going to have books with his pictures in them.” Mr. Wyeth, who seemed to understand her thought, said out loud: “You’ll find others—Kay Nielsen and Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and Noel Pocock.” Alice said, “Yes, no doubt,” but in her own mind she decided it must be because he was as modest as he was wonderful.
“Do you like boys’ stories?” asked a boy much older than Nils, who had come up suddenly. “Of course!” Alice responded. She looked at him more closely. “Why you must be the boy in High Benton, aren’t you?” He grinned. “I guess I am. I was only going to say, if you like boys’ stories—and all the girls I know do—my friend, William Heyliger, has written a new one, The Spirit of the Leader. It’s stuff like High Benton, a high school story. Great!” Alice was about to ask him for the book when all the editions began running past so rapidly that she became dizzy and screamed and shut her eyes. When she opened them a moment later, Authorland had vanished and she was back at her starting place and the White Queen was asking with sharpness:
“Have you been all this time deciding on something to read? You have to read, you know, in order to grow up; and at this rate you’ll never grow up at all!”
Penrod’s Five-Foot Shelf.
Feeling the need of solitude, Penrod Schofield moved slowly toward the barn. As he walked he kicked desultorily at such objects, animate and inanimate, as obtruded themselves in his path—the round top of the water cutoff in the lawn, on which he had broken the blades of the lawn mower last Saturday; a bag of clothes pins reposing harmlessly on its side, and the white cat, Sherlock Holmes. “Ole cat!” Sherlock, untarnished by the hostile toe, trotted off complacently. Creatures like Penrod were little in the life of one who had been victor over the hound of the neighbouring Baskervilles.
Choosing Entrance Two, the youth ascended to Apartment B-3 of the barn, a second-story location offering an outside window with no bath but with proper seclusion. Here on a conscientiously measured shelf of his own manufacture was the beginning of the Penrod Schofield Library. The shelf, constructed in his leisure hours, was exactly five feet in length, a noted educator having assured Penrod and others, through the medium of many full-page advertisements, that the books on a five-foot shelf could furnish the equivalent of a college education. With a passion for exactitude, and in pursuance of a further condition, Penrod was devoting to the books on his five-foot shelf a requisite fifteen minutes a day.
“Five feet divided by fifteen minutes a day makes—makes——.” The youth struggled for a while with this intricate problem in arithmetic, at length muttering: “I know. Y’ count the pages, and then divide by fifteen; no, by the number of pages y’ c’n read in fifteen minutes;—no, that ain’t right either, is it?” There was no answer; there would be none if he looked in the back of one of the books, either; and for a while Penrod had a doubt whether, on looking in the back of the noted educator’s head, any answer would be found there. He did not understand how the educator could possibly be right, nohow, for of course the first and indispensable item for any book shelf was the complete works of G. A. Henty. He ran his eye along these:
Bravest of the Brave; or, With Peterborough in Spain
By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War