Page:The American Boy's Handy Book edition 1.djvu/15

cated and expensive apparatus, the impossible feats of legerdemain and the time-worn conundrums, riddles, and games that help to make up the contents of the boy's books of my youth.

Unfamiliar and foreign terms, references to London shops as places to procure the articles mentioned, glittering generalities, and a general disregard for details are the marked characteristics of the books to which I refer.

Never shall I forget the disappointment experienced, when after consulting the index, I sought the article on paper balloons and found only the bare statement of the fact that balloons made of paper and filled with heated air would ascend. If I remember aright, the whole description occupies less than four lines.

Although the greater portion of the contents of the present volume has never been published before, some of it appeared as short articles in the St. Nicholas Magazine; and the directions and descriptions then given have been tested by thousands of boys throughout the United States, and, judging from the letters I have received, with uniform success.

Of course, such a book cannot, in the nature of things, be exhaustive, nor is it, indeed, desirable that it should be. Its use and principal purpose are to stimulate the inventive faculties in boys, to bring them face to face with practical emergencies when no book can supply the place of their own common sense and the exercise of personal intelligence and ingenuity.

Many new ideas will suggest themselves to the practical, ready-witted American boy, many simplifications and improve-