Acknowledgments are due to the following persons for their courteous permission to use valuable selections from their works: Dr. Charles C. Abbott for the essay on "The Robin"; Mr. William Dean Howells for his sketch of "Life in the Backwoods"; The J. B. Lippincott Company for the selections from Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" and Abbott's "Birdland Echoes"; and Mr. Frank R. Stockton for "The Story of Tempe Wicke."
SCHOOL READING.
SIXTH YEAR.
TWO WAYS OF TELLING A STORY.
I.
Who is this? A careless little midshipman, idling about in a great city, with his pockets full of money.
He is waiting for the coach: it comes up presently, and he gets on the top of it, and looks about him.
They soon leave the chimney pots behind them; his eyes wander with delight over the harvest fields, he smells the honeysuckle in the hedgerow, and he wishes he was down among the hazel bushes, that he might strip them of the milky nuts; then he sees a great wain piled up with barley, and he wishes he was seated on the top of it; then they go through a little wood, and he likes to see the checkered shadows of the trees lying across the white road; and then a squirrel runs up a bough, and he can not forbear to whoop and halloo, though he can not chase it to its nest.
The other passengers are delighted with his simplicity and childlike glee; and they encourage him to talk to them about the sea and ships, especially Her Majesty's ship "The Asp," wherein he has the honor to sail. In the jargon of the sea, he describes her many perfections, and enlarges on her peculiar advantages; he then confides to them how a certain middy, having been ordered to the masthead as a punishment, had seen, while sitting on the topmast crosstrees, something uncommonly like the sea serpent—but, finding this hint received with incredulous smiles, he begins to tell them how he hopes that, some day, he shall be promoted to have charge of the poop. The passengers hope he will have that honor; they have no doubt he deserves it. His cheeks flush with pleasure to hear them say so, and he little thinks that they have no notion in what "that honor" may happen to consist.
The coach stops: the little midshipman, with his hands in his pockets, sits rattling his money, and singing. There is a poor woman standing by the door of the village inn; she looks careworn, and well she may, for, in the spring, her husband went up to the city to seek for work. He got work, and she was expecting soon to join him there, when alas! a fellow-workman wrote her word how he had met with an accident, how he