For instance, there is a book I did not have when I was a child because it was not written.

It is Laura E.Richard's "Nursery Rhymes." My own children loved them dearly, and their mother and I loved them almost equally; the delightfully light-hearted "Man from New Mexico who Lost his Grandmother out in the Snow," the adventures of "The Owl, the Eel, and the Warming-Pan," and the extraordinary genealogy of the kangaroo whose "father was a whale with a feather in his tail who lived in the Greenland sea," while "his mother was a shark who kept very dark in the Gulf of Caribee." As a small boy I had _Our Young Folks_, which I then firmly believed to be the very best magazine in the world--a belief, I may add, which I have kept to this day unchanged, for I seriously doubt if any magazine for old or young has ever surpassed it.

Both my wife and I have the bound volumes of _Our Young Folks_ which we preserved from our youth.

I have tried to read again the Mayne Reid books which I so dearly loved as a boy, only to find, alas! that it is impossible.

But I really believe that I enjoy going over _Our Young Folks_ now nearly as much as ever.
"Cast Away in the Cold," "Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead," "The William Henry Letters," and a dozen others like them were first-class, good healthy stories, interesting in the first place, and in the next place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct.