VACATION TIME
June’s a name we like to hear;
Glad vacation’s drawing near;
Good-bye, good-bye, lesson books;
Welcome fields and merry brooks;
All our lessons now are over;
See the fields of nodding clover.
The Ink-Bottle Babies gladly cry,
“’Tis vacation time, good-bye, good-bye!”
“Hurrah!” cried the Ink-Bottle Babies, “hurrah! hurrah! it is glad
vacation time!”
Then the Ink-Bottle Mamma said, “We will all go to the woods to-day.”
So the Babies were busy packing their twenty-five little dinner pails and
they packed a basket of lunch for Ma and Pa.
They all started merrily toward the woods. Molly said, “Do you suppose we
will find the house where the little dwarfs live?”
Then the Ink-Bottle Babies all clapped their hands and shouted, “Oh Ma!
oh Pa! do help us find the little dwarfs!”
Then Mamma took out a red and white table cloth and spread it on the
grass, and all the Ink-Bottle Babies began to unpack their dinner pails,
and soon they had a fine dinner ready.
They filled their glasses with water from a spring, and just as they were
going to sit down a little dwarf ran past them and called,
“When you take your meal at noon,
You should use the magic spoon!”
[Illustration: “_They filled their glasses with water from a spring_”]
Then the little dwarf took the magic spoon and dipped it into every glass
of water, and the water turned at once into lemonade.
They looked around to thank the little dwarf, but he was gone!
Then the Ink-Bottle Babies cried, “We must find the house where the
little dwarfs live!”
After a while the Ink-Bottle Mamma and Papa got tired and went home. They
left the Babies in the woods for a while.
The Babies were so sleepy they took quite a nap, and when they woke up
they said, “Let us look for the home of the little dwarfs.” They spoke in
whispers; they were almost afraid to speak out loud.
They picked up their dinner pails and walked a long way. Suddenly they
saw a light twinkling in the distance. The light came from a little wee
house in the woods. One of the Babies rapped at the door and a little
dwarf came out and said,
“We have bedrooms five and twenty,
And of food we have a plenty;
Kindly step in, please, to-night,
By this ray of candlelight!”
The Ink-Bottle Babies stepped inside, and they saw five and twenty little
dwarfs sitting at a table, eating soup with their five and twenty little
spoons. The little dwarfs got up politely and offered their seats to the
Babies and they sang,
“Ink-Bottle Babies, ’tis very fine,
With the magic pitcher at last to dine.”
Then the Ink-Bottle Babies started to eat some soup, but one little dwarf
ran around and poured something into each soup dish out of the magic
pitcher. One plate of soup was changed to jelly and one plate was changed
to ice cream and so it went all round the table!
The Babies shouted, “Hurrah! for the magic pitcher,” and they laughed
until they cried!
Then they all sat down in a circle and they told stories and one little
dwarf cried,
“I am so hungry to-night, ho! ho!
Where did the magic spoon chance to go?”
The little dwarfs all shook their heads sadly. Then what do you suppose
happened? The Ink-Bottle Babies all rose and began to dance and cry,
“We know who has the magic spoon,
A little dwarf we met this noon!”
[Illustration: “_Whirling a great spoon_”]
Then all the dwarfs put on their fuzzy coats and their fuzzy caps, and
they said,
“Follow the leader, every one,
Follow along till rise of sun!”
Then the dwarfs went out of the door, two and two, and the Ink-Bottle
Babies did not know what else to do, so they followed them.
They ran along up hill and down dale until they came to a valley.
Then their leader called, “Hark! Listen! Hark!” They looked down in a
valley and they saw a little dwarf, dancing and singing.
The little dwarf was whirling a great spoon in the air. He sang,
“Be it morning, night or noon,
No one knows I’ve the magic spoon!”
Then the little dwarfs rushed at him from one side, and the Babies rushed
at him from the other side, and the magic spoon began to beat everybody,
and at last they all ran back to the home of the little dwarfs. Where the
magic spoon went nobody knew.
Then the five and twenty little dwarfs cried,
“We will not cry, we will not sigh,
The magic spoon will soon pass by!”
Pretty soon the magic spoon came dancing along and said,
“I will go and hide upon your shelf,
If you’ll let me go and help myself!”
The dwarfs replied,
“Oh magic spoon, ’tis very clear
To every one, you’re welcome here.”
The magic spoon was so pleased then that it began to stir the river that
flowed by the little dwarfs’ home, and the river became solid gold!
The little dwarfs sang,
“Ha! ha! ha! when we are old,
We shall never want for gold!”
Then they ran and got five and twenty little bags, and they began to
break up the gold in the river and fill their bags. Still there was more
gold than the little dwarfs could carry away.
At last the little dwarfs were done working and the Ink-Bottle Babies
were tired and sleepy and they said, “Tell us a story, please.”
Then one little dwarf told this story:
Once upon a time there was a little dwarf who had a rocking-chair.
The rocking-chair was a pretty one; it had golden rockers and golden
arms. It was a very comfortable rocking-chair! One day a dwarf got into
the chair. He was a very naughty dwarf. He would not say, “Thank you,”
and “If you please.”
Now, the chair took him for a ride and said,
“Say ‘thank you for this ride,’
Or you will have to stay inside!”
The naughty dwarf shook his head and cried,
“You’ll not teach me manners, I do declare,
You funny little rocking-chair!”
[Illustration: “_Splash! the chair went right into the water_”]
The chair said,
“You may laugh and cry and even shout,
Without ‘Thank you, Sir!’ you don’t get out!”
Then the dwarf began to laugh and cry and shout, for he was stuck fast in
the rocking-chair, and he could not get out!
Now the chair was in earnest and it rocked as fast as it could down to a
river and the dwarf cried,
“What are you about? What are you about?
If we rock in there, we will never get out!”
Splash! the chair went right into the water. It came up by and by and the
little dwarf shouted,
“Thank you, thank you, please take me out,
Thank you, thank you, I’ll laugh and shout!”
Then the chair took the dwarf out and set him on dry land.
Now as soon as the dwarf was free he would not say “Thank you,” again,
and the chair said, “I will teach him a lesson this time.”
So the chair asked the little dwarf to take another ride, and he rocked
him away, away, away up north to the land where the polar bear lives.
Then he rocked him right into a snowdrift. The little dwarf nearly froze
his toes and fingers, and the chair said,
“I’ll leave you in this drift of snow,
For far away I soon will go!”
The dwarf was so scared at the idea of being left alone in the snowdrift
that he said,
“I’ll say to you on bended knees,
Thank you, sir, and if you please.”
Then the chair rocked the little dwarf safely home, and ever after he was
so polite that if he even met a squirrel in the woods he would stop and
say, “Excuse me, sir, am I disturbing you? Thank you, sir, I will come
this way again, if you please!”
This was the end of the story and the Ink-Bottle Babies set up a shout as
usual.
“What became of the magic rocking-chair?” they all shouted together.
Then they clapped their hands softly, for they saw something rocking
toward them!
What do you suppose it was?
It was the magic rocking-chair!
Then the dwarf who had told the story said,
“Tell the chair where you want to go;
Ride away, ride away, singing ho! ho!”
Then the Ink-Bottle Babies all climbed into the rocking-chair, and they
shouted as they waved their twenty-five little pocket handkerchiefs,
“We wave good-bye with backward looks;
We will ride into the story books!”
The magic chair began to rock, and it rocked the Ink-Bottle Babies away,
away, away, into the Land of Story Books.
If you use your eyes well, you may see the Ink-Bottle Babies some day!
Did they ever come out of the books? Did they ever come home again? I did
not remember to ask them any questions. Perhaps you will meet them in
school.
[Illustration: “_We wave good-bye_”]
The last I saw of them they were rocking away and they sang this song,
“Vacation time! Vacation time!
’Tis an hour for song and rhyme;
We are very happy, for what do you think?
We all came out of a bottle of ink!
The Ink-Bottle Babies in every clime,
Cry, ‘Hurrah! hurrah! for vacation time!’”
Fairy Tales of Long Ago
By Julia Darrow Cowles
Grades 3-4 Cloth Binding
128 Pages Colored Illustrations
Price, 60 Cents a Copy, Postpaid
Train a child’s imagination by feeding it with the fancies of great
story-tellers, is a truism familiar to all teachers. There is nothing
like the old fairy tales for nourishing young imaginations. This group of
tales Mrs. Cowles has gathered from many sources and retold in charming
fashion. That they have gained, rather than lost, by the retelling, will
soon become apparent to teachers; for only the simplest words and phrases
are used, and the narrative is so handled as to emphasize the homely
lesson in manners or morals concealed in the story.
These tales are full of action and delicious nonsense which accord with
the child’s mode of living and thinking. Besides teaching the children
to read, and furnishing them with much fine entertainment, these stories
inculcate lessons in good-fellowship, usefulness, politeness, and
agreeable wholesome living.
The volume comprises fifteen stories, five of which are dramatized for
schoolroom use.
CONTENTS
[Illustration]
The Nightingale
The Six Swans
Bruno’s Picnic
Ole Shut-Eyes
Inger’s Loaf
Southwest Wind Esquire
The Three Lemons
The Twelve Months
A Mad Tea Party
The Enchanted Mead
The White Cat
The Ugly Duckling
The Miller’s Daughter
Professor Frog’s Lecture
The Spring in the Valley
A. FLANAGAN COMPANY—CHICAGO
The Children of Mother Goose
By JULIA DARROW COWLES
_For Grades Two and Three_
_Illustrations in Colors_
_128 Pages Cloth Binding_
Price, 60 Cents a Copy, Postpaid
THE CHILDREN OF MOTHER GOOSE
[Illustration: “_I wonder which goose gave it to me_”]
“Oh, Mother Goose,” they all cried, “your goose has laid a
golden egg!”
“Why, sure enough,” said Mother Goose. “That must be my Easter
present. I wonder which goose gave it to me!”
Then Simple Simon waved his hand just as though he were in
school, and said, “It was Jack-A-Dandy. I saw him put it in the
nest!”
_Specimen Page_
Many a young reader longs to know more about his favorite characters in
Mother Goose—more than the short rhyme about each is able to tell him.
In this collection of miniature stories, he has his wish gratified. Here
he gets intimate glimpses of the home and community life of many old
friends: Mistress Mary, Boy Blue, Peter Piper, Curly Locks, Crosspatch,
Simple Simon, Jack and Jill, Tommy Tinker, Bobby Shaftoe, and a host of
others.
It appears that the Mother Goose children are a healthy, fun-loving,
workaday lot of youngsters, exactly like the boys and girls who read
about them. They attend Dame Trot’s school. They give tea parties and
Valentine parties. They take care of the babies of the Old Woman Who
Lives in a Shoe. They help the Crooked Man build himself a new chimney.
Dr. Foster takes them walking in the woods and teaches them things about
insects and spiders which every child is simply aching to know. Mother
Goose herself presides delightfully over their revels.
Teachers will find these stories valuable for inculcating a love of
reading in the child; first, because they are intrinsically fascinating,
and second, because they quicken his mental powers by a shrewd
application of some lesson in daily living.
A. FLANAGAN COMPANY—CHICAGO
The Circus Cotton-Tails
[Illustration]
By
LAURA ROUNTREE SMITH
Illustrated by Fred Stearns
“Please tell us a laughing story,” pleaded a group of tenement children
at the Settlement story hour.
All children laugh when they read “The Circus Cotton-Tails” and how
the merry little bunnies diligently practice their circus tricks
while mischievous Bushy-Tail plays his tricks—whirling them off the
merry-go-round, and stealing Susan Cotton-Tail’s cookies. How the cookies
become alive and punish Bushy-Tail satisfies the little folk’s sense of
justice. And they delight in the description of the big circus parade,
and in the colored frontispiece and end sheets, to say nothing of the
many fascinating black and white illustrations.
128 pages. Cloth, 60 cents
A. FLANAGAN COMPANY
CHICAGO
JUST STORIES
BY
ANNIE KLINGENSMITH
Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Gary, Indiana
AUTHOR OF
“Household Stories” and “Norse Gods and Heroes”
In “Just Stories” Miss Klingensmith has selected and adapted from the
best in children’s literature more than thirty of the stories she
considers especially needed in work with children in the third and
fourth grades. They were originally printed as leaflets by Gary pupils
and aroused an enthusiasm that demanded their continued existence.
The illustrations are exceptionally good, and with the large, clear
type, good paper, and durable binding, “Just Stories” is an unusually
attractive book.
128 Pages—Illustrated
Cloth—60 Cents
[Illustration: “‘WHAT HAVE YOU TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?’ SAID THE LION”
(Illustration from “Benjy in Beastland”—one of the stories.)]