Chapter XII · CLASSIC STORIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.

The boy or girl who has grown up without reading Robinson Crusoe, the Arabian Nights and Gulliver’s Travels is to be pitied; but it is to be presumed that there are few such. These books are good alike for young and old.

For young children fairy tales are usually considered the first to become familiar with, and of these the best are Grimm’s and Hans Christian Andersen’s. There are many volumes variously edited, and all are fairly good. A modern fairy tale that is also a classic is Kingsley’s Water Babies, and even better are Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Kipling’s Jungle Book.

There are also Æsop’s Fables.

But when boys and girls get a little older they want to find what is to them a really good book. I know none better than Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women. It is the story of four girls and a boy; but boys will like it almost as well as the girls will.

Boys will be especially interested in the lives of great men, and of these none is better than Franklin’s Autobiography. He tells just how he worked, and what he did, and how he succeeded, and tells it in simple, natural English. And next to this one will like a good life of Washington or Lincoln, of which there are many.

Hawthorne wrote many good stories for young people, and of these the simplest are his Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales from the ancient Greek, and his Biographical Stories of Great Men. But readers a little older will like even better such stories as “The Snow-Image,” “The Great Stone Face,” etc.

There is a remarkable book not very much known, entitled Moby-Dick, or the Great White Whale, by Herman Melville. It is not all as interesting as the last part, in which this giant whale named Moby-Dick is hunted down and killed, though not until he has sunk the ship and boats of the men who have pursued him and taken his life.

For adventure there are no more classic books than Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, and Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and David Balfour, and some will wish to read his beautiful Child’s Garden of Verse. Not quite so literary but equally interesting are The Boys of Seventy-Six, Green Mountain Boys, Scottish Chiefs, Thaddeus of Warsaw, Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, and The Swiss Family Robinson.

Last of all we must mention Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which, though very English, is very interesting. John Halifax, Gentleman, by Miss Mulock, is also a fine English story.

Though not stories precisely, Lamb’s Tales from Shakspere and Dickens’s Child’s History of England are quite as fascinating as if they were genuine stories.

In these days the Bible seems to be neglected somewhat, and not all children are familiar with the fine stories for young people with which the Old Testament is filled. There are, to be sure, uninteresting genealogies and other things mixed in with the stories; but there is nothing in Grimm or Andersen to equal the stories of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, of Noah and the Flood, of David and Goliath, of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, and of Jonah and the Whale.