Book Excerpt:"To the student desiring an intimate acquaintance with any civilized people, its lighter literature is always a great aid to personal research; the more trivial, the more detailed, the greater the worth to the investigator are these pen-pictures as records of the nation he wishes to know. Something of this value have the storybooksof old-fashioned childhood. Trivial as they undoubtedly are, theynevertheless often contain our best sketches of child-life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,-a life as different from that of a twentieth century child as was the adult society of those old days from that of the present time. They also enable us to mark as is possible in no other way, the gradual development of a bodyof writing which, though lagging much behind the adult literature, was yet also affected by the local and social conditions in America." --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.