n was done, for you can read it all here in language simple enough
for the youngest of you to understand. Here you are told how white men
came over the seas and found beyond the waves a land none of them had
ever seen before. You are told how they settled on these shores, cut
down the trees and built villages and towns, fought with the red men and
drove them back, and made themselves homes in the midst of fertile
fields. You are told how others came, how they spread wider and wider
over the land, how log houses grew into mansions, and villages into
cities, and how at length they fought for and gained their liberty.

Read on and you will learn of more wonderful things still. The history
of the past hundred years is a story of magic for our land. In it you
will learn of how the steamboat was first made and in time came to be
seen on all our rivers and lakes; of how the locomotive was invented and
railroads were built, until they are now long enough in our country to
go eight times round the earth; of the marvels of the telegraph and
telephone--the talking wire; of the machines that rumble and roar in a
thousand factories and work away like living things, and of a multitude
of marvels which I cannot begin to speak of here.

And you will learn how men kept on coming, and wars were fought, and new
land was gained, and bridges were built, and canals were dug, and our
people increased and spread until we came to be one of the greatest
nations on the earth, and our cities grew until one of them was the
largest in the world except the vast city of London. All this and more
you may learn from the pages of this book. It is written for the boys
and girls of our land, but many of their fathers and mothers may find it
pleasant and useful to read.

There are hundreds who do not have time to read large histories, which
try to tell all that has taken place. For those this little history will
be of great service, in showing them how, from a few half-starved
settlers on a wild coast, this great nation has grown up. How men and
women have come to it over the seas as to a new Promised Land. How they
have ploughed its fields, and gathered its harvests, and mined its iron
and gold, and built thousands of workshops, and fed the nations with
the food they did not need for themselves. Year by year it has grown in
wealth, until now it is the richest country in the world. Great it is,
and greater it will be. But I need say no more. The book has i