The Junior Classics, vol 5 | Page 2

"that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and Don Quixote?"
At this time, when the subject of vocational training is receiving so much attention, and public school instruction is being criticized because, its critics say, it does not prepare boys and girls to meet the demands which life makes upon them, it is interesting to read what was said almost a hundred years ago by a man whose influence on education has been both deep and lasting in character.
They have just been celebrating in France the centenary of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In the early chapters of "Emile" we read: "Since we must have books, there is one which, to my mind, furnishes the finest treatise on Education according to nature. My Emile shall read this book before any other. It shall for a long time be his entire library. It shall be a test for all we meet during our progress toward a ripened judgment, and so long as our taste is unspoiled we shall enjoy reading it. What wonderful book is this? Aristotle? Pliny? Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe."
There is no more useful talent than the ability to think and speak (or write) clearly and simply, no matter what our vocation in life. None know better how difficult it is to find writers with a good narrative style than those editors whose training and experience have made them realize its value and importance. If we examine the experience of those who, in comparatively recent days, have stirred men with the force and directness of their simple speech, as Lincoln, for example, we find that as boys they were great readers of the Bible, and Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Shakespeare, Bunyan, and Scott. As examples of English these books stand preeminent.
Lord Brougham relates that one of his friends, a professor in a university, consulted one of the ablest historians of his time as to what would be the best discipline for acquiring a good narrative style, as a prelude to writing a book of travels through Asia. The advice given him was to read Robinson Crusoe carefully. When the professor expressed astonishment, supposing it to be a jest, the historian said he was quite serious, but that if Robinson Crusoe would not help him, for any reason, he recommended Gulliver's Travels. The late Donald G. Mitchell once said: "If you should ever have any story of your own to tell, and want to tell it well, I advise you to take Robinson Crusoe for a model!"
Parents and teachers who do not read aloud to young children, or who do not practise telling stories to children, probably do not realize what simple but extraordinarily valuable opportunities for self-education they are ignoring, to say nothing of the help they can be to children. In order to be successful we have to try and put ourselves in the child's place.
The average reader does not concentrate sufficiently to get the thought clearly from the text, and does not imagine himself to be actually in the midst of the scene he is describing. The consequence is that his voice and actions are not, except perhaps in a slight degree, affected by the emotions he is supposed to be experiencing. Dramatic rendering of dramatic passages is worth striving for, and should be encouraged on the part of children.
The story-teller who roars with the lion and bleats with the lamb is sure to be rewarded with shouts of enthusiastic delight from the audience.

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
All nations have their fairy tales, but India seems to have been the country from which they all started, carried on their travels by the professional story-tellers who kept the tales alive throughout Asia. In Bagdad and Cairo to-day, that cafe never lacks customers where the blind storyteller relates to the spell-bound Arabs some chapter from the immortal Arabian Nights, the King of all Wonder Books.
No one knows where the tales were written, except that they came out of the Far East, India, Arabia and Persia. Haroun Al Raschid, who was called The Just, was a real Eastern monarch who lived in Bagdad over eleven hundred years ago, about the same time that Charlemagne was King of France. We can believe that the tales are very old, but the most we know is that they were translated from Arabic into French in 1704-17 by a Frenchman named Galland, and that the manuscript of his translation is preserved in the French National Library. American boys first had the chance to read the notes in English about the time President Monroe was elected.

ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES
There once lived in a town of Persia two brothers, one named Cassim, and the other Ali Baba. Their father divided a small inheritance equally between them. Cassim married a very rich wife,