Land of Play

Verses—Rhymes—Stories

Selected by Sara Tawney Lefferts

Illustrated by M. L. Kirk & Florence England Nosworthy

New York Cupples & Leon Company

Copyright, 1911, by CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Printed in U.S.A.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgment is due the following publishers and authors, for their courteous permission to use material on which they hold copyright:

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., for permission to use “Hiawatha’s Childhood,” “The Heights by Great Men Reached,” by Henry W. Longfellow; “Barefoot Boy,” by John G. Whittier; “Chippy Chirio,” by John Burroughs; “What the Winds Bring,” by Edmund Clarence Stedman; “Fable,” “Duty,” by Emerson; “The Brown Thrush,” by Lucy Larcom; “April,” by Alice Cary.

The Century Co., for permission to use “The Little Elf,” by John Kendrick Bangs.

Small, Maynard & Co., for permission to use “The Tax Gatherer,” by John B. Tabb.

Harper & Brothers, for permission to use “A Child’s Laughter,” from The Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Little, Brown & Co., for permission to use “The Swallow,” “There’s Nothing Like the Rose,” by Christina G. Rossetti; “Boys and Girls,” by Louisa M. Alcott.

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., for permission to use “Follow Me,” by Eliza Lee Follen.

New England Publishing Co., for permission to use “Our Mother,” from The American Primary Teacher.

The Reilly & Britton Co., for permission to use “The Christmas Stocking,” by L. Frank Baum (copy. 1905).

Sarah J. Day, for permission to use “Buttercups,” from “Mayflowers to Mistletoe” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons).

Kate Upson Clark, for permission to use “Charlie’s Story,” “Marjorie’s Bath,” “Good Listening.”

Good Housekeeping Magazine, for permission to use “A Dutch Lullaby,” “A Dutch Winter,” by Ella Broes van Heekeren.

Newson & Co., for permission to reprint “A Story of Washington.”

Charles Scribner’s Sons, for permission to use “Extremes,” by James Whitcomb Riley, from “The Book of Joyous Children”; “My Ship and I,” “The Little Land,” from “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and “The Duel,” by Eugene Field.

—Robert Louis Stevenson.

Knowing how much good books are enjoyed by those who travel through what Stevenson calls “The Land of Play,” it has been a pleasure to select from the verse and prose of our best writers, old and new, the contents of this pictured volume for “The Little People,” and perchance for some older traveller who may wish to be,—

—S. T. L.

HIE AWAY.

—Sir Walter Scott.

CHARLIE’S STORY.

—Kate Upson Clark.

Old King Cole.

Rub-a-Dub-Dub.

SEVEN TIMES ONE.

—Jean Ingelow.

GOING INTO BREECHES.

—Charles and Mary Lamb.

MR. PEGGOTTY’S HOUSE.

I had known Mr. Peggotty’s quaint house very well in my childhood, and I am sure I could not have been more charmed with it if it had been Aladdin’s palace, roc’s egg and all. It was an old black barge or boat, high and dry on Yarmouth sands, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney. There was a delightful door cut in the side, and it was roofed in, and there were little windows in it. It was beautifully clean, and as tidy as possible. There were some lockers and boxes, and there was a table, and there was a Dutch clock, and there was a chest of drawers, and there was a tea-tray with a painting on it, and the tray was kept from tumbling down by a Bible, and the tray if it had tumbled down, would have Smashed a quantity of cups and saucers and a tea-pot that were grouped around the book.

On the walls were colored pictures of Abraham in red going to sacrifice Isaac in blue, and of Daniel in yellow being cast into a den of roaring green lions. Over the little mantleshelf was a picture of the “Sarah Jane” lugger, built at Sunderland, with a real little wooden stern stuck on it—a work of Art combining composition with carpentry, which I had regarded in my childhood as one of the most enviable possessions the world could afford.

—Charles Dickens.

From the author’s condensation of David Copperfield.

Hark, hark! the Dogs do Bark!