us rascals like our Patch-Eye and the Duke. Its
author stands, in my opinion, a better chance of our lasting memory
than any writer living.

If you have read this book, you have known in its author a man who is
himself a child--one from whom the years have never taken toll. And if
you have lingered from page to page, you know what humor is, and love
and gentleness. I think that children must have clambered on his
familiar knee and that he learned his plot from their trustful eyes.

Someone has been reading my very copy of this book, for it is marked
with pencil and whole chapters have been thumbed. I would like to know
who this reader is--a woman, beyond a doubt--who has dug in this
fashion to the author's heart. But the book is from a lending
library. She is only a number pasted inside the cover, a date that
warns her against a fine.

Her pencil has marked the words to a richer cadence. I like to think
that she has children of her own and that she read the book at
twilight in the nursery, and that its mirth was shared from bed to
bed. But the pathetic parts she did not read aloud, fearing to see
tears in her children's eyes. Before her own at times there must have
floated a mist. She is a gracious creature, I am sure, with a
gentleness that only a mother knows who sits with drowsy children. And
now that it is my turn to read the book--for so does fancy urge me--I
hear her voice and the echo of her children's laughter among the
pages.

It is a book about a great many things--about David and about a
sausage machine, about a little dog which was supposed to have been
caught up by mistake. But when the handle was reversed out he came,
whole and complete except that his bark was missing. A sausage still
stuck to his tail, which presently he ate. And it proved to be his
bark, for at the last bite of the sausage his bark returned. And David
took his salty handkerchief from his eyes and laughed. There is a
chapter on growing old--marked in pencil--a subject which the author
of this book knew nothing about, never having grown old himself. And
there is another chapter about a spinster, also marked. This chapter
sings with exquisite melody, but breaks once to a sob for a love that
has been lost. But the book is chiefly about children.

There is one particular sentence in this book with which I am not in
agreement. "... down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory
tells us we run but once...." I cannot believe that.