Page:Roads to Childhood (1920).pdf/129

There was a fairy story, of course, and we were ending with “The Jumblies” and other nonsense verses when some one called out:

again!” This time several voices mingled in Allingham’s “Fairies.”

In that far-off time many libraries still observed an age limit of ten or twelve years, and gravely questioned the propriety of reading aloud to children or telling stories to children in a room from which books were being circulated or consulted in answering the casual questions brought from the schools. The public schools of Brooklyn observed a grade limit. “Children below the third grade do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books,” we were told. The system of classroom libraries had not then been introduced. The children in question ranged in age, we found, from five or six to eight, and sometimes even nine years if they were backward in learning to read.