Ah, Yes, Dear, Dear

Just "McGuffey's," that's all. No other identification is necessary for multitudes of Americans. How could it be otherwise when 120,000,000 copies of the famous Readers were used by the children of 37 states in the later two-thirds of the last century?

No man in our history did more to shape the national mind. Many owed to those books a love for good reading. The simplest virtues, enforced by attractive tables and essays, sphorisms and short quotations, helped to form the character of the school children of three generations. That 20,000 were present recently at the dedication of the memorial to William Holmes McGuffey on the farm in western Pennsylvania where he was born is an eloquent testimonial to the worth of his work. Henry Ford honored himself and rendered a public service in promoting the project.

Do you remember those books? In the First Reader you began with "the dog ran," and learned to read words of two and three letters. In the high school, with the Fifth and Sixth Readers, students read Hamlet and Childe Harold. Step by step they mounted the ladder. Each reader was well illustrated and all were equipped with lessons in punctuation, inflection, modulation, and with glossaries and biographical notes.

Take down the "Fourth Eclectic" from the shelf, used in grammar schools. Here are ninety selections in prose and poetry. Familiar names catch the eye, Celia Thaxter Lucy Larcom, J. T. Trowbridge, James Buchanan Road, Lowell, Longfellow. Here is a part of the Sermon On the Monat. There is a scene from Tom Brown's Schooldays and again a part of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy. Here also is:

"We were crowded in the cabin

Not a soul would dare to sleep:

It was midnight on the waters,

And a storm was on the deep."

Could you name the author? It was James T. Fields.

Look over the next in the series. In all eighty-seven authors are represented, with New England leading. But Dickens and Thackeray, Charles Kingsley and Jean Ingelow, Tennyson, even the London Times, are in the list. Whittler tells about "the fish I didn't catch," and Tom Hood about "faithless Nelly Grey."

To this Reader many owe their knowledge of the fact that the name of Abou Ben Adhem "led all the rest." Now, with Caroline Norton, one reads about the "soldiers of the Legion" who "lay dying in Algiers," and then he turns to Charles Lamb's "Dissertation on Roast Pig." How many thousands of youngsters have been fired by Webster's "Supposed Speech of John Adams" and how many have laughed over Hawthorne's "Rill from the Town Pump"?

Good reading, well selected, varied in mood and subject, an introduction to the great literature of the world--these facts account for the fame of that old-time Presbyterian college professor--"McGuffey." Those were the happy days. Boston Herald.