Boating: A Handy Book for Beginners_, his _The Field and Forest Handy
Book_, his _The Jack of All Trades_, his _The Outdoor Handy Book_, and
his _The American Boy’s Handy Book_
LINA and ADELIA B. BEARD’S _Recreations for Girls_ and their _The
American Girl’s Handy Book_
Fiction.
JOSEPH A. ALTSHELER’S stories. Altsheler wrote seven romances (_The
Last Rebel_, etc.), eight books in The Young Trailers Series, beginning
with _The Young Trailers_; three books in The Texan Series (_The Texas
Star_, etc.) and three miscellaneous Indian stories (_The Last of the
Chiefs_, _The Quest of the Four_ and _Apache Gold_) as well as two of
The Great West Series, _The Great Sioux Trail_ and _The Lost Hunters_.
He wrote three stories dealing with the World War, but his French and
Indian War Series (six books beginning with _The Hunters of the Hills_)
and his Civil War Series (eight books, beginning with _The Guns of Bull
Run_) are old favourites
RALPH HENRY BARBOUR. School stories. Besides fifteen not in any series
and the Yardley Hall stories (eight, beginning with _Forward Pass_)
five series of three books each--Hilton, Erskine, the “Big Four,”
Purple Pennant and Grafton
WILLIAM HEYLIGER. The author of _High Benton_ and _High Benton,
Worker_. There are three books in the Fairview Series, five in the St.
Mary’s Series, six in the Lansing Series, besides the extremely popular
books about Don Strong in the Boy Scout Series--_Don Strong of the Wolf
Patrol_, _Don Strong, Patrol Leader_, and _Don Strong, American_
FRANK T. BULLEN’S _The Cruise of the Cachalot_, a classic for boys
RALPH D. PAINE’S _A Cadet of the Black Star Line_, his _The Fugitive
Freshman_, his _The Head Coach_, his _College Years_, his _Campus
Days_, his _Sandy Sawyer, Sophomore_, his _The Stroke Oar_, and his
_Sons of Eli_
LAWRENCE PERRY’S _For the Game’s Sake_, his _The Big Game_, and his
_The Fullback_ (Fair Play Series)
DAN BEARD’S _The Black Wolf Pack_
FRANK B. LINDERMAN’S _Lige Mounts: Free Trapper_
FRANCIS LYNDE’S _The Golden Spider_
LEO E. MILLER’S _Adrift on the Amazon_, his _In the Tiger’s Lair_, his
_The Hidden People_ and his _The Black Phantom_
ARTHUR STANWOOD PIER’S _The Boys of Saint Timothy’s_
JULES VERNE’S _Around the World in Eighty Days_, his _A Journey to the
Centre of the Earth_, his _From the Earth to the Moon_, and his _Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS’S _The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys_
JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS’S _The Adventures of a Freshman_, his _Princeton
Stories_, and his _The Day Dreamer_ (“The Stolen Story,” a newspaper
classic)
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER’S Young Journalists Round the World
Series--_Plotting in Pirate Seas_, _Hunting Hidden Treasure in the
Andes_, _Heroes of the Ruins_, _A Toreador of Spain_, _The Magic-Makers
of Morocco_
STEWART EDWARD WHITE’S _The Adventures of Bobby Orde_
RUSSELL DOUBLEDAY’S _Cattle Ranch to College_, and his _A Gunner Aboard
the “Yankee”_
O. HENRY’S _The Ransom of Red Chief_ and _Other O. Henry Stories for
Boys_
RALPH STOCK’S _The Cruise of the Dream Ship_. The hobo seafaring
adventures of a boy. A fine book, not nearly well enough known
LEWIS E. THEISS’S _A Champion of the Foothills_
CAROLINE DALE SNEDEKER’S _The Perilous Seat_. The story of a young
Greek girl who saved her country
JOSLYN GRAY’S _Elsie Marley_, her _Rosemary Greenaway_, and her newest
tale, _The Old Mary Metcalf Place_. Other Joslyn Gray stories are
_Bouncing Bet_, _The January Girl_, _Rusty Miller_, and _Kathleen’s
Probation_
MARGARET W. EGGLESTON’S _Fireside Stories for Girls in Their Teens_
E. F. BENSON’S _David Blaize_ and his _David Blaize and the Blue Door_
ISLA MAY MULLINS’S _Captain Pluck_ (founded on fact)
MARION AMES TAGGART’S _The Annes_, her _Captain Sylvia_, her _The
Daughters of the Little Grey House_ (_The Little Grey House_ should be
read first) and her _“Who Is Sylvia?”_ (a sequel to _Captain Sylvia_)
Mainly Historical.
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER’S Romance-History of America Series--_In the Days
Before Columbus_, _The Quest of the Western World_, and _The Coming of
the Peoples_, each illustrated by C. A. Federer
NOAH BROOKS’S _First Across the Continent_. The story of the Lewis and
Clark expedition
CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY’S _In the Wasp’s Nest_ (War of 1812) and _On the
Old Kearsage_ (Civil War)
SIDNEY DARK’S _The Child’s Book of England_ and his _The Child’s Book
of France_
BASIL MATHEWS’S _The Quest of Liberty: The Adventures of the
“Mayflower” Pilgrims_
H. E. MARSHALL’S _This Country of Ours: The Story of the United States_
EVERETT T. TOMLINSON’S _Young People’s History of the American
Revolution_, his _Places Young Americans Want to Know_, his _Fighters
Young Americans Want to Know_, his _The Story of General Pershing_, his
_Scouting on the Border_, his _Mysterious Rifleman_
Young Heroes of Our Navy, a series comprising ROSSITER JOHNSON’S _The
Hero of Manila_, J. BARNES’S _Commodore Bainbridge_, his _With the Flag
in the Channel_, his _Midshipman Farragut_, and his _The Hero of Erie_
(Commodore Perry); and MOLLY ELLIOTT SEAWELL’S _Decatur and Somers_,
her _Paul Jones_, and her _Little Jarvis, the Heroic Midshipman_
_Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children_, edited by JOSEPH
BUCKLIN BISHOP
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS’S _Real Soldiers of Fortune_ and his _With Both
Armies in South Africa_
A. HYATT VERRILL’S _The Real Story of the Pirate_, and his _The Real
Story of the Whaler_
STEWART EDWARD WHITE’S _Daniel Boone: Wilderness Scout_
BERNARD MARSHALL’S _The Torch Bearers_, a new novel of the time of
Oliver Cromwell
RUSSELL DOUBLEDAY’S _Stories of Inventors_
Inventions, Games, Plays, and the Fascinations of Science.
A. FREDERICK COLLINS’S _The Book of the Microscope_, his _The Book of
Wireless Telegraph and Telephone_, his _The Book of Stars_, _The Book
of Magic_, _The Book of Electricity_, _The Home Handy Book_, _How to
Fly_, _The Amateur Mechanic_
FRANK M. RICH’S _The Jolly Tinker_. How to make all sorts of things
out of the simplest materials, how to mend shoes, repair books, make a
cardboard loom, etc.
RAY STANNARD BAKER’S _The Boy’s Book of Inventions_ and his _The Boy’s
Second Book of Inventions_ have already been mentioned
GILBERT T. PEARSON’S _The Bird Study Book_
FRANK M. CHAPMAN’S _Bird Life_, his _Our Winter Birds_, his _What Bird
Is That?_ and his _Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America_
_Birds Worth Knowing_, by NELTJE BLANCHAN; _Butterflies Worth Knowing_,
by CLARENCE M. WEED; _Flowers Worth Knowing_ (NELTJE BLANCHAN adapted
by ASA DON DICKINSON); and _Trees Worth Knowing_, by JULIA ELLEN ROGERS
Game books by EDNA GEISTER--_It Is To Laugh_, her _Let’s Play_, and her
_Fun Book_
_The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays for Children_, by JOHN FARRAR
_Three to Make Ready_, by LOUISE AYRES GARNETT. Plays
_Ten Minutes by the Clock_, by ALICE C. D. RILEY. Plays
S. LYLE CUMMINS’S _Plays for Children_
Three Books for Parents.
FLORENCE V. BARRY’S _A Century of Children’s Books_
ANNIE CARROLL MOORE’S _New Roads to Childhood_, and her _Roads to
Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books_. By the supervisor of
work with children in the New York Public Library.
_10. The Man Called Ralph Connor_
i
Once upon a time there was a Scotsman of Clan Gordon, those Highlanders
ye ken of Blair Athol in the North Country, properly named with a
God-fearing name, Daniel, and a fine, stirring preacher, too. Fire
was on his lips but the flame burning in his heart was tender and you
should have lived to hear him piping “Lochaber No More.” The pibrochs
sounded something beautiful as he played; and when he stopped piping
it was to begin relating wonderful old stories; he kenned them all.
Away back in the 1840s it was he came out to Canada with other folk
from the North of Scotland and fetched up in a Highland settlement in
Ontario, Glengarry, in the Indian Lands. Full twenty years this man of
God spent in Glengarry, taking a wife from among the Robertsons. Her
father had come to New England first, moving on to Sherbrooke in the
Province of Quebec. I could tell you a deal about her family; there was
a cousin, Andrew Murray, of Clairvaux, led the Dutch Reformed South
African Church; ye’ll have heard of Robertson Smith and he was another
cousin; the writer M. M. Robertson was a sister. Mary Robertson
taught philosophy as a lass of twenty in Mount Holyoke College in New
England. They offered to make her principal on the death of Mary Lyons
and she was duly considering for a while. She was of the Robertsons
of Aberdeen, ye ken, and twenty-two years aged. But there was this
young Highlander, Daniel Gordon of Glengarry in the Indian Lands, who
was swaying congregations. Well, then, she turned her small, straight
back on the principalship and married him, and went away from that
pleasant place and company and fine position that stood waiting for
her to live in the backwoods of Canada, a rare wild parish with the
railway twenty-five miles off and a long journey to everywhere. She was
a remarkable woman. Daniel Gordon took her to his home in the woods.
In the year 1860 she bore him a son; they named the boy Charles. The
laddie played about the square brick house with wide verandas that
stood in a natural park of pines and maples, with a glebe of some
twenty-four acres and forest all about. Two miles by a path through the
woods took him to school in a clearing, and two miles back. They played
games in the shadows of the pines. There was a rich green darkness and
a curious coolness and a curious warmth there for them; the tops of the
pines murmured like distant bagpipes and everything smelt sharp and
sweet.
On a day when the boy was eleven Daniel Gordon went to sway another
congregation in Western Ontario, taking his wife and the boy along,
for that there were better schools for Charley to go to. What with
this, and high school in a neighbouring town, the lad makes ready for
Toronto and the University. He didna do badly at the University,
though he was no sober-sided student. He sang in the glee club and
played quarterback at Rugby football in the champion team for Western
Ontario. Some honours in classics he got and went on to the study of
theology at Knox College. He was not too strong in those years and
capturing scholarships and prizes in the three years’ courses at Knox
College did him no good bodily. So then it was settled he should take
a year abroad, spent mostly in Edinburgh, where he could walk along
gay Princes Street and see the grand sight of Castle Rock, or climb
to Arthur’s Seat and look over the Firth of Forth with its speckle of
green islands and white sails and the bare country of the Kingdom of
Fife, or pace slowly down the Royal Mile to Holyrood, with every step a
threefold memory and an historic lesson. I’ll not say this did him any
harm, maybe, and what it lacked in one way he made up on his return to
Canada, taking his brother and travelling deep into the forest on Lake
Nipissing, they seeing no other white man for three months. To crown
these journeyings and to confirm the habit of health Charles Gordon
spent two more years at Banff. There, in the heart of the Rockies, he
climbed mountains and rejoiced in wildness. “Yes, I ought to have been
an Indian!” he used to exclaim.
ii
He was ripe to receive his call at last, and it came. It took him to
a life of rough hardship as a missioner in the North-West, all among
lumbermen and miners with a congregation to be gathered first, and
sore deeficult to sway in assembly. He came well-shod to the work of
treading out the harvest in the Lord’s vineyard. He could go into the
woods and come out again, or face a man mad with drink, or comfort a
sick mother. A tall, slender, well set up young missioner with no very
much ruddiness of complexion and a thoughtful, serious face that could
yet smile, for a’ that, with crinkles in the eye corners. You would
know him for Scots by his look, but the rest is puir American. And he
loved those men among whom his work lay. When, along in 1894 and him
just well into his thirties, he was asked to a city church, he didna
want to respond favourably until he saw where his duty lay. Well, then,
he came to Winnipeg and to the ministry of St. Stephen’s because it
offered him the grand chance to help those roughened men whose needs
he knew. Ye ken, perhaps, Mr. J. A. MacDonald of the Toronto Globe
newspaper. MacDonald had been a classmate of Charley Gordon’s and a
year or two after Charley Gordon came as preacher to St. Stephen’s,
MacDonald was owner of a new little paper called The Westminster and
concerned with Canadian Presbyterianism--a frank experiment. Into the
office of The Westminster dropped Charley Gordon one fine day. He was
in a great heat for money to put into the foothills and the mountain
camps. They needed missions out there; I’m burning up with the wish
to write an article telling about those men in the pines and along
the upland lakes, Charley Gordon tells MacDonald. I’ve facts and
figures. MacDonald was quick to say, if Charley wanted to bring home
his message to people and loosen the purse-strings, he had a duty to
write the thing as a tale, paint a picture with lifelike figures and a
warm feeling running through it all. Gordon minded himself of what he
had seen and heard in such good plenty; and he went home and sat down
to write a story of Christmas Eve among the lumbermen in the Selkirk
mountains. When he was fair into it, he found himself carried back and
away, so much so that in reading it through after he didna see what
brother clergymen might make out of the ringing speech of some of his
characters. MacDonald agreed, but sent to find out what name to put on
the story. Gordon invented a name, Cannor, out of the first letters of
“Canada” and “North-West.” MacDonald picked up the reply telegram and
snorted disdain. Cannor, he commented, what sort of a name is that!
I’ll make it Connor. And where’s a first name? Frank? Fred? Chris? No.
Ralph? Aye, we’ll make it that. This was the birth and christening
together, ye’ll ken. The tale of the lumbermen’s Christmas Eve in the
mountains was later to become the first chapter of the novel, _Black
Rock_, the first novel by Ralph Connor, that was read everywhere.
iii
I’ll not have to be telling you what it was in _Black Rock_ won so
many readers for Ralph Connor. Humour and pathos are bound up in the
lives the young minister of St. Stephen’s was writing about; ye could
lay hold quickly of his sympathy for those men who were in some
ways as helpless as bairns and were half-brutalised by their work
and surroundings. It’s the effect they have on each other, too. Them
picking up _Black Rock_ to read were struck with something fresh and
wild and clean, withal. They sensed a tenderness about the feeling of
the story, like heather softening the bare hillside, and more than a
morsel of the everlasting hope in which men endure hard and lonely
toils. The same held true of the books that followed _Black Rock_;
for there had to be other books. Ye mind _The Sky Pilot_ and _The Man
From Glengarry_ and _The Foreigner_ and _Corporal Cameron_ and _The
Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_. Take _The Foreigner_. On the edge of
Winnipeg, Charles Gordon found a Settlement of Slavs--Ruthenians,
Russians, Galicians and who not. They lived in a grim little collection
of huts, a dozen in a room, all huddled up, drinking and dirty and
violent; and on them was still the shadow of tyrannies in the Old
Country. Drinking and dirty and violent with a violence dark and
beautiful, Charles Gordon found them. Aye, he found the huts and the
men, and Ralph Connor that was in him found a story. Ralph Connor
took the splendid young heart in Kalmar, the son of a nihilist, and
brought it to fight its way out of the ruck of aliens and make for the
new country beyond the Saskatchewan, where there is prairie and where
the lakes lie on the surface of the prairie like jewels on a woman’s
breasts. Then, in _Corporal Cameron_, was Connoring the first grand
tale of the North-West Mounted Police, by a man who kenned them, as
followers in his tracks scarce can be said to. A richt fine love story
is this of the lad who was born in a Scottish glen and came to ride out
in the Canadian blizzards; it’s furthered in _The Patrol of the Sun
Dance Trail_, which makes use of the half-breed and Indian rebellion
of Louis Riel. But there’s a muckle I love in the book besides the
adventure--Cameron and his gold-haired, plucky wife and the hesitant
wonder of the first fine feeling of the lover. It fashes me how a man
says what’s down in the hearts of such a many other men and women. Give
me to understand how it’s done! Here’s the Reverend Charles Gordon
dwelling this quarter century and longer in Winnipeg, building up St.
Stephen’s and seeing it transformed from a plain chapel of wood into
a handsome church of stone, with a church house where the young men
without homes can live, and where there’s sewing and amateur acting and
films and bowling every night of the week. In the daytime the Reverend
Gordon will maybe attend court to help get some boy straightened
out and become a guardian to him; or he’ll be at meetings in his
church where revolutionary agitators are spouting the downfall of all
institutions and then voting thanks to the preacher because, as they
put it, he has given us an absolutely square deal. And after supper you
would find him in his home at evening prayers with the three youngsters
who appeared to enjoy their devotions. There’s no stiltedness in the
man at all. He reads from Scripture concerning Paul taking Timothy with
him to learn what were the problems of that day. And he closes the book
on his finger to remark what a sensible, canny thing for Paul to do.
Some of our theological seminaries, adds the father, shut a man out
from contact with life, shut him up with professors, and when he comes
out of his cloister he canna recognise a social problem if it walks
up to him on the street. The trouble with me, he finishes, when I had
gotten out of the seminary.
But he’s generous to a fault sore in a son of Scots folk. If his right
hand is earning moneys with a pen, his left hand is spending lavish
and free. There’s his salary as minister to the kirk goes flowing out
several times over in gifts and helpings to people. I mind the year
quite long back when the Presbyterian General Assembly of Canada was
meeting in Toronto and Doctor the Reverend Gordon put down $10,000 so
every missionary minister and his wife in the breadth of Canada might
attend the General Assembly, expenses paid. Some of these men and their
wives hadn’t been out of the woods in years. Ralph Connor knew what
this meant.
iv
Then, when the Great War came thundering, our sky pilot stood up and
said Canada must send a half million men. Many scoffed at him; but he
was right, and we sent the half million and over sixty thousand didna
come back. From St. Stephen’s there was an enlistment of close on four
hundred, including the minister and five members of the Session. The
dominie went in the spring of 1915 after the congregation had confirmed
his leave of absence--Major Charles W. Gordon, chaplain to the
Forty-third Battalion Cameron Highlanders of Canada. Many St. Stephen’s
men were enrolled in this battalion and one of the members of the
Session, Robert McDonald Thomson, was their first colonel. It was the
Western Front--from the Ypres Salient, Sanctuary Wood, the bloodshed
of the Somme and back again to Arras. In that time Ralph Connor saw
the regiment shrunk from full strength to two officers and sixty-five
men. He knelt down amid the roar of guns and the hailing of machine
gun bullets to do last rites for his own men and comrades. Among them
was Colonel Thomson. On the eighth day of October, 1916, the outfit
stormed the Regina Trench on the Somme. Unable to advance, they wouldna
retreat. So they died where they stood.
v
_The Major_ and _The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land_ are books ye’ll verra
well recollect; likewise the novel of twa years back, _To Him That
Hath_. Since ye hanna read it, it’s the new novel from the pen of Ralph
Connor, I’ll just speak a word of to ye. He calls it _The Gaspards of
Pine Croft_ and explains it is “a romance of the Windermere Valley.”
A story of the life and moulding of Paul Gaspard, it is. Here’s a mon
with two powerful strains mixed and fighting for mastery of him. From
his mither, Paul inherits a rare sense of the presence of God; his
father gifted him with a fine artist sense, and a bounding spirit,
a passion for life to the full. The clash of the two men in the boy
grows with him to manhood, so that after the death of his mither he
stands between two women, who beckon different ways. Then when a great
decision is put before him the mon takes upon himself a burden and
a responsibility that test him body and soul. ’Tis a life and death
struggle set in the grand country Ralph Connor makes his own. There’s
the valley of the Windermere before you with the Gaspard ranch, Pine
Croft, flanked on one side by a great bend of the Columbia River and
on the other by a mountain wall of virgin forest. In this mysterious
wilderness, the figures of Indians do come and go, touching the lives
of the white people with disaster, with dread--with an unco beauty as
well.
Books by Ralph Connor
_Beyond the Marshes_
1898 _Black Rock_
1899 _The Sky Pilot_
_Ould Michael_
1901 _The Man from Glengarry_
1902 _Glengarry School Days_
_Breaking the Record_
1904 _The Prospector_
_The Pilot of Swan Creek_
_Gwen_
1906 _The Doctor of Crow’s Nest_
_The Life of Dr. James Robertson_
1909 _The Foreigner; A Tale of Saskatchewan_
_The Angel and the Star_
_The Dawn by Galilee_
_The Recall of Love_
1912 _Corporal Cameron of the North-West Mounted Police:
A Tale of the MacLeod Trail_
1914 _The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_
1917 _The Major_
1919 _The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land_
1921 _To Him That Hath_
1923 _The Gaspards of Pine Croft_
Sources on Ralph Connor
_Ralph Connor, the Well-Beloved._ Booklet published in 1914 by George
H. Doran Company. Now out of print.
_Silver Jubilee, 1895-1920, of St. Stephen’s, Winnipeg._ Booklet
published by the congregation of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church,
Winnipeg, Manitoba.
_II. Here, There and Everywhere_
i