ing. Story
first, poem afterward, is a good rule to follow if you want to create a
taste for poetry. Sometimes just a remark, "Let us see how this sounds
in poetry," will create enough interest to enable the parent to begin
reading aloud to an attentive audience. Most children will not learn to
like poetry if left to their own devices. It must be read aloud to them
and its beauties pointed out occasionally to create a love for so
artificial a thing as metrical composition.

Parents will find in the General Index at the end of this volume not
only reference to the contents of _Journeys_ by title and author, but
also a classification of subject matter, so that it will be easy to find
different examples of poetry,--lyric, ballad, sonnet,--and of
prose,--fiction, adventure, history, etc., offering a wide range of
selection for story-telling purposes.

_Little Giffin of Tennessee_

This little narrative poem (Volume IV, page 461), is intensely dramatic.
Too abrupt in style for easy reading and filled with words the children
may not understand, it is not well adapted to the very young. But
there's a story in it of courage and deep patriotism that will be an
inspiration to every child who can hear it. What better subject can a
parent find for his son's encouragement than a tale told in his own
words or read in the following?

Little Giffin of Tennessee was only a boy, only a boy of sixteen, not
bigger nor stronger than Charlie, Thomas or George Jones whom you see
going by to school every day. Yet he wasn't running along bareheaded
carrying a bat or swinging his books by a strap. Little Giffin was a
poor wounded soldier boy who had been already in eighteen battles; more
than one, you see, for every year of his short life.

In the last terrible charge, a grape shot had struck him in the leg and
arm and torn the flesh from his broken bones. Over him his comrades
swept up to the face of the enemy's guns, and little Giffin was left to
fight his battle with cold, and rain and hunger. All night long he lay
moaning on the ground, and it was late in the forenoon of the next day
when he was found and taken to the hospital.

There they laid his mangled body among the hundreds of others who had
met with a fate as hard as his own. It was hours before the surgeons
could come to him, and then so hurried were they by other calls upon
them that only a hasty dressing of his poisoned wound was possible.

Some kindly visitors found him