The Country Child : Part 4

The American Child
by Elizabeth McCracken

(Page 7 of 13)

The books were of many types - poetry, fiction, historical stories, nature study, and several volumes of the "how to make" variety. All of these were of the best of their several kinds - identical with the books found in the "Children's Room" in any well-selected public library. Some of them had been gifts to the children from "summer boarders," but the majority had been chosen and purchased by their parents.

"We hunt up the names of good books for children in the book review departments of the magazines," the mother said.

When I asked what magazines, she mentioned three. Two she and her husband "took"; the other she borrowed monthly from a neighbor, on an "exchange" basis.

No other children in that region were so abundantly supplied with books; but all whom I met liked to read. Their parents, in most cases unable to give them numerous books, had, in almost every instance, taught them to love reading.

One boy with whom I became friends had a birthday while I was in the neighborhood. I had heard him express a longing to read "The Lays of Ancient Rome," which neither he nor any other child in the vicinity possessed, so I presented him with a copy of it.

"Would you mind if I gave it to the library?" he asked. "Then the other children around could read it, too."

"The library!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, I don't mean the one down in the village," he hastened to explain. "I mean the one here, near us. Haven't you been to it?"

When he found that I had not, he offered to go with me to see it. It turned out to be a "lean-to" in a farmhouse that was in a rather central position with relation to the surrounding farms. The library consisted of about two hundred volumes. The librarian was an elderly woman who lived in the house. One was allowed, she told me, to take out as many books as one wished, and to keep them until one had finished reading them.

"Do you want to take out any?" she inquired.

After examining the four or five shelves that comprised the library, I wanted to take out at least fifty. The books, especially the "juvenile books," were those of a former generation. Foremost among them were the "Rollo Books," "Sandford and Merton," Mary Howitt's "Story-Book," and "The Parents' Assistant."

"Who selected the books?" I asked.

"Nobody exactly selected them," the librarian said. "Every one around here gave a few from their collections, so's we could have a near-to library - principally on account of the children. I live most convenient to every one hereabouts; so I had shelves put up in my lean-to for them."

News travels very rapidly indeed in the country. My boy friend told some of the other children that I was reading the oldest books in the library. "She takes them out by the armfuls," I overheard him remark.

No doubt he made more comments that I did not overhear; for one morning a small girl called to see me, and, after a few preliminaries, said, "If you are through with 'The Fairchild Family,' may I have it? You like it awfully much, don't you?"

Not only in the secular teaching of their children do thoughtful country parents, in common with careful fathers and mothers living elsewhere, try to obtain the best means and to use them to the best ends; in the religious instruction of their children they make a similar attempt. They are not content to let their children learn entirely at home, to depend solely upon parental guidance. The church, and even the Sunday school, are integral parts in the up-bringing of the most happily situated country children. The little white meeting-houses in the small rural villages are familiar places to the country child - joyously familiar places, at that. The only weekly outing that falls to the lot of the younger children of country parents is the Sunday trip to church and Sunday school.

What do they get from it? Undoubtedly, very much what city children receive from the church and the Sunday school - in quantity and in quality. There is a constant pleasure from the singing; an occasional glimmer of illumination from the sermon; and an unfailing delight from the Bible stories. We can be reasonably sure that all children get thus much from the habitual church and Sunday-school attendance. Some, irrespective of city or country environment, glean more.