Children's Literature

Did you ever notice the queer fancies that birds have about their houses? Town-bred birds like them of wire, gilded, or trig little cottages on the stable-roof; but the houses of country birds are quite another thing. They are plain brown generally, made of grass or moss, with white wool carpets inside. But I have seen birds dig them out of the hot sand, or, down by the sea, build them of great branches, plastered with mud...

Lieut. Calderwood was at his sister’s house on a visit, during his two weeks’ furlough. He was sitting with her one evening in the parlor, while her two children were studying their lessons at the table in the back room...

Chip led a very quiet life until the occurrences of the remarkable adventures which have made him famous. He was the third son of a Sand-Martin—one of that ancient family of Sand-Martins which has lived for generations in a hill overlooking the river Dee, in Cheshire. (An English family, of course.) Chip lived in a castle...

Little Mrs. Thurlow stood up, to give her words more weight. They did not seem to mean any thing at all to her; she was such a very little woman, and her back ached so much, and her hands trembled so that she had to steady herself on the back of a chair...

Now I hope--but, as I remember the ways of girls and boys, I am not at all sure--that you will find this story more attractive because it is in all essential particulars absolutely true...

"Girls, I have a plan!” exclaimed Dolly Rober. The girls of the junior class in the Hillsborough school, to which Dolly belonged, had gathered, as they always did on their half-holidays, out at the Rober farm...

Mary Brunt was a visiting governess in Philadelphia. She went from house to house giving lessons to little children in the rudiments of knowledge. She was not young, nor beautiful, nor particularly clever, yet she had hosts of loyal friends, and if any of them had been asked to name a woman whose life was full, secure and happy, they would probably have named the poor governess, Mary Brunt...

ONE cold evening in September, nearly seventy years ago, two men were walking up one of the four hilly streets of Wheeling. Now a large manufacturing centre, Wheeling was then only a quiet village in the north-western part of Virginia. Its four streets straggled along the slope of a high of a high wooded hill, side by side. At the base of the hill the Ohio ran, while a wide creek of a peculiar emerald clearness cut them in two and emptied its green flood into the muddy river...

Among old Delaware planters still linger many traditions of the adventures of ship-masters and their crews who sailed out of Delaware Bay in the last century. What with the war, English pirates and Algerine corsairs, they earned their bread through great tribulation...

Every boy who reads this magazine has heard the story of the sinking of the Republic and of how the lad who was the operator of the Wireless telegraph stood at his post for hours until he had brought help to passengers and crew. But there was a little sequel to the story which they may not have heard...