The Pont du Gard Henry James 223   (Chapter XXVI of A Little Tour in France) The Youngest Son of his Father's House Anna Hempstead Branch 231 Tennessee's Partner Bret Harte 235 The Course of American History Woodrow Wilson 252   (In Mere Literature) What I Know about Gardening Charles Dudley Warner 268   (From My Summer in a Garden) The Singing Man Josephine Preston Peabody 280 The Dance of the Bon-Odori Lafcadio Hearn 291   (From Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Volume I, Chapter VI) Letters: Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells 305   (From The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich by Ferris Greenslet) Thomas Bailey Aldrich to E.S. Morse 305   (By permission of Professor Morse) William Vaughn Moody to Josephine Preston Peabody 306   (From Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody) Bret Harte to his Wife 307   (From The Life of Bret Harte by Henry C. Merwin) Lafcadio Hearn to Basil Hall Chamberlain 309   (From Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn) Charles Eliot Norton to William Dean Howells 311   (From Letters of Charles Eliot Norton) Exercises in Dramatic Composition 316 Modern Books for Home Reading 319

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MODERN PROSE AND POETRY FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS

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A DAY AT LAGUERRE'S

F. HOPKINSON SMITH

It is the most delightful of French inns, in the quaintest of French settlements. As you rush by in one of the innumerable trains that pass it daily, you may catch glimpses of tall trees trailing their branches in the still stream,—hardly a dozen yards wide,—of flocks of white ducks paddling together, and of queer punts drawn up on the shelving shore or tied to soggy, patched-up landing-stairs.

If the sun shines, you can see, now and then, between the trees, a figure kneeling at the water's edge, bending over a pile of clothes, washing,—her head bound with a red handkerchief.

If you are quick, the miniature river will open just before you round the curve, disclosing in the distance groups of willows, and a rickety foot-bridge perched up on poles to keep it dry. All this you see in a flash.

But you must stop at the old-fashioned station, within ten minutes of the Harlem River, cross the road, skirt an old garden bound with a fence and bursting with flowers, and so pass on through a bare field to the water's edge, before you catch sight of the cosy little houses lining the banks, with garden fences cutting into the water, the arbors covered with tangled vines, and the boats crossing back and forth.

I have a love for the out-of-the-way places of the earth when they bristle all over with the quaint and the old and the odd, and are mouldy with the picturesque. But here is an in-the-way place, all sunshine and shimmer, with never a fringe of mould upon it, and yet you lose your heart at a glance. It is as charming in its boat life as an old Holland canal; it is as delightful in its shore life as the Seine; and it is as picturesque and entrancing in its sylvan beauty as the most exquisite of English streams.

The thousands of workaday souls who pass this spot daily in their whirl out and in the great city may catch all these glimpses of shade and sunlight over the edges of their journals, and any one of them living near the city's centre, with a stout pair of legs in his knickerbockers and the breath of the morning in his heart, can reach it afoot any day before breakfast; and yet not one in a hundred knows that this ideal nook exists.

Even this small percentage would be