I like to have what the
library and father have."
Parents buy books for their children in very much the proportions that
parents bought them before the land was dotted with public libraries.
Indeed, they buy books in larger proportions, for the reason that there
are so many more books to be bought! The problem of the modern father or
mother is not, as it once was, to discover a volume likely to interest
the children; but, from among the countless volumes offered for sale,
all certain to interest the children, to choose one, two, or three that
seem most excellent where all are so good. A mother of a few generations
ago whose small boy was eager to read tales of chivalry simply gave him
"Le Morte D'Arthur"; there was no "children's edition" of it, no "Boy's
King Arthur," no "Tales of the Round Table." The father whose little
girl desired to read for herself the stories of Greece he had told her
put into her hands Bulfinch's "Age of Fable"; he could not, as can
fathers to-day, give her Kingsley's rendering, or Hawthorne's, or Miss
Josephine Preston Peabody's.
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