The little Scotch boy sees his robin, a little bird with a reddish-yellow breast, come to his window, and hears the cawing of the rooks.  We in the United States can hear the rough voice of the blue-jay, or perhaps see the busy downy woodpecker tapping industriously at the suet we have hung in the tree for him.

A few days later the water in the pond becomes hard as stone, and we can walk over its smooth, glittering surface, or, if we are old enough, can make our way back and forth in widening circles to the music of our ringing skates.  When the cold grows too severe and our cheeks burn in the wind, we can run inside, curl up in a big chair where it is warm and cheery, and, burying our faces in our favorite books, can see once more the little waves dancing on the pebbly shore of the pond, and hear the babble of the brook.

What can we find in the books?  Everything that makes life merry, and everything that helps us to be true and manly.  Out in the pasture the sheep are grazing, and among them walk the shepherds, singing gaily to the wide sky and the bright sun.  When, perchance, a frisking lamb strays near the woods where perils lie, the shepherd follows, and with the crook at the end of his staff draws the wanderer back to safety.

These wonderful books of ours will carry us across the seas, even.  We, for instance, might go to Scotland and play with the boy Stevenson.  What a delight it would be; for the man who can write so charmingly about children must have been a wonderfully interesting boy to play with.  And the cities we should see—­quaint old Edinburgh, with its big, frowning castle on the top of that high rugged hill, and in the castle yard, old Mons Meg, the big cannon that every Scotch lad feels that he must crawl into.

If that is too far away from us, we will come back to Boston, and walk through the Common, and hear again the Yankee boys bravely complaining to General Gage because the British soldiers have trampled down the snow fort the youngsters have built.

But those are only real things; the more wonderful things are the flying fairies whose deeds we may read in this very book.

But how can we write in prose the praise of the picture story-books when Stevenson thinks he cannot do it in his pretty rhymes?  Moreover, we have just found out that the poet’s chimney corner is filled with the little ones who can read only the simplest things, and need big, fine pictures and easy words.  He was not writing for us at all—­but that does not matter.  His little poem pleases us just the same.

Let us turn back and read it again—­I suspect that, after all, we are all of us small enough to sit in a chimney corner; and perhaps every book is but a picture story-book to the man or woman who is old enough and big enough to read it rightly.

HOW THE WOLF WAS BOUND

Adapted by Anna McCaleb