Project Gutenberg's A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: A Child's Garden of Verses

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Illustrator: E. Mars
M. H. Squire

Release Date: May 27, 2008 [EBook #25617]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Christine D. and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

A CHILDS
GARDEN
of VERSES

[Illustration]

[Illustration: _A Child's Garden_]

A CHILD'S
GARDEN
of VERSES

By ROBERT
LOUIS
STEVENSON

ILLUSTRATED by
E. MARS
AND M. H. SQUIRE

RAND McNALLY &
COMPANY
CHICAGO
NEW YORK
LONDON

[Illustration]

_Copyright, 1900, by_
ROBERT HOWARD RUSSELL

_Copyright, 1902, by_
RAND MCNALLY & COMPANY

All rights reserved
Edition of 1928

[Illustration]
Made in U. S. A.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, or Robert Louis Stevenson, as the world
knows him, was still a boy when he published this rare volume of "A
Child's Garden of Verses," although by the calendar he was thirty-five
years old. You and I have sighed, no doubt, to be a boy again, but here
was one who, while he outgrew his knickerbockers, never outgrew the quick
sympathy, the brave heart, the fresh outlook, the confident faith and
buoyant spirit of the little Scotch boy who roamed the hills 'round
Edinburgh. Better than any man of any time he was able to enter into the
heart of a boy, to view things with a boy's eyes, and to write of them in
simple verse, touched with the warmth and color of his rich imagination.
In these "Verses" he writes as a child rather than about children, and in
this lies much of the charm which they possess for little readers. There
is in them the surprise of reality, the beauty of a simple rhythm, and the
mysterious flavor of magic that grips a boy's heart and will not let him
go until the book has become a part of him. Surely this is a rare quality
in schoolbooks.

The Stevensons had been famous engineers for more than a hundre