I think there ought to be children’s books.  I think that the child will like grown-up books also, and I do not believe a child’s book is really good unless grown-ups get something out of it.  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.  At the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls’ stories—­“Pussy Willow” and “A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life,” just as I worshiped “Little Men” and “Little Women” and “An Old-Fashioned Girl.”

This enjoyment of the gentler side of life did not prevent my reveling in such tales of adventure as Ballantyne’s stories, or Marryat’s “Midshipman Easy.”  I suppose everybody has kinks in him, and even as a child there were books which I ought to have liked and did not.  For instance, I never cared at all for the first part of “Robinson Crusoe” (and although it is unquestionably the best part, I do not care for it now); whereas the second part, containing the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with the wolves in the Pyrenees, and out in the Far East, simply fascinated me.  What I did like in the first part were the adventures before Crusoe finally reached his island, the fight with the Sallee Rover, and the allusion to the strange beasts at night taking their improbable bath in the ocean.  Thanks to being already an embryo zoologist, I disliked the “Swiss Family Robinson” because of the wholly impossible collection of animals met by that worthy family as they ambled inland from the wreck.  Even in poetry it was the relation of adventures that most appealed to me as a boy.  At a pretty early age I began to read certain books of poetry, notably Longfellow’s poem, “The Saga of King Olaf,” which absorbed me.  This introduced me to Scandinavian literature; and I have never lost my interest in and affection for it.