THE FIRST LOCK 43

THE BUTLER GUARDS 105

ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE 127

NUTTING 141

INTRODUCTION

There are two conspicuous faults in the literary culture which we are
trying to give to our boys and girls in our elementary and secondary
schools: it is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not
sufficiently national and American. Hence it lacks vitality and
actuality. So little of it is carried over into life because so little
of it is interpretative of the life that is. It is associated too
exclusively in the child's mind with things dead and gone--with the
Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere,
the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively
recent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk of
the days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and the
Ancient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studies
do not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which--if
he reads at all--he is most likely to be concerned: the short story, the
sketch, and the popular essay of the magazines and newspapers; the new
novel, or the plays which he may see at the theatre. He has not been
interested in the writers of his own time, and has never been put in the
way of the best contemporary fiction. Hence the ineffectualness and
wastefulness of much of our school work: it does not lead forward into
the life of to-day, nor help the young to judge intelligently of the
popular books which later on will compete for their favor.

To be sure, not a little of the material used in our elementary schools
is drawn from Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, from Irving and
Hawthorne; but because it is often studied in a so-called thorough and,
therefore, very deadly way--slowly and laboriously for drill, rather
than briskly for pleasure--there is comparatively little of it read, and
almost no sense gained of its being part of a national literature. In
the high school, owing to the unfortunate domination of the college
entrance requirements, the situation is not much better. Our students
leave with a scant and hurried glimpse--if any glimpse at all--of
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, or of Lowell, Lanier, and Poe; with no
in