Page:Roads to Childhood (1920).pdf/136

to have known him well as a little boy. That I was like him in certain qualities of mind I was to learn in maturity; that I shared his emotional life, I knew as well at four or five years old as at his death, when I was twenty.

We make no apology for dipping back into our childhood and the childhood of our work, in this introductory consideration of the reading of children under ten years old. We warn the reader it will not tell him just the book to read or to buy for the child he is interested in. We have never liked the idea of selecting “best books” for anybody,—least of all for a child who is trying out the reading habit, we dare not set an age limit for the reading of a book. But we feel no hesitation in bringing together a group of books, which we shall describe as “Some First Books” and a second group that we shall call “Some Later Books.”

There have been many and important changes since 1900 in the attitude toward the younger children in schools and libraries. Not only is there a great deal more