Part 2

INDIAN LIFE AND CUSTOMS 76

CAN YOU UNDERSTAND RELATIONSHIP? 89

OPENING THE GREAT WEST 90

TURNING OUT THE INTRUDER 96

THE TRAINING OF A BOY KING _H. E. Marshall_ 97

"SOME UGLY OLD LAWYER" 103

ADDING THE RIGHT WORDS 104

THE DESERT INDIANS' "FIRE BED" 105

YES OR NO? 105

PIETRO'S ADVENTURE _John Clair Minot_ 106

SOME PATRIOTIC MINE WORKERS 111

FATHER DOMINO 112

THE GOOD GIANT WINS HIS FORTUNE 116

THE MOLE AWAKES _S. C. Schmucker_ 117

THE COUNT AND THE ROBBERS _Beatrix Jungman_ 119

WHAT THE EARLIEST MEN DID FOR US _Smith Burnham_ 124

TRY THIS 136

PUTTING WORDS WHERE THEY BELONG 137

MAKING MONEY EARN MONEY 138

HEROES OF HISTORY _Mabel Dodge Holmes_ 139

THE SKELETON IN ARMOR _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ 149

ACTING FOR THE MOVIES 156

THE SAFEST PLACE _Casimir A. Sienkiewicz_ 158

UNPATRIOTIC CARELESSNESS 167

A MEMORY TEST 169

CALIPH FOR ONE DAY 170

THE FIRST POTTER _Hanford M. Burr_ 180

FINDING OPPOSITES 187

"IT'S QUITE TRUE!" _Hans Christian Andersen_ 188

TANGLED SENTENCES 191

HOW SELLA LOST HER SLIPPERS _Mabel Dodge Holmes_ 192

THE GHOST OF TERRIBLE TERRY 198

ROAST CHICKEN 203

WHY THE ECHO ANSWERS _Mabel Dodge Holmes_ 204

THE FIGHT WITH THE SEA _Beatrix Jungman_ 207

AGRICULTURE 210

CAN YOU DO THIS ONE? 215

THE INCHCAPE ROCK _Robert Southey_ 216

SOME DEFINITIONS 218

THE BATTLE OF MORGARTEN _John Finnemore_ 219

FINDING OPPOSITES 222

WHAT MEKOLKA KNOWS 223

THE BEAR'S NIGHT 228

IS IT THE SAME BEAR? 231

THE CHINESE NEW YEAR'S DAY _Lena E. Johnston_ 232

ADDING THE RIGHT WORDS 235

THE GOOD CITIZEN--HOW HE USES MATCHES 236

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 242

THE MAGIC HORSE 243

THINKING 255

WHAT IS A BOY SCOUT? 256

THE SCOUT AND THE KNIGHT 258

THE FIRE SPIRIT _Hanford M. Burr_ 259

THE BOYHOOD OF A PAINTER _Andrew Lang_ 273

CIVIL DEATH 277

OTELNE, THE INDIAN OF THE GREAT NORTH WOODS _J. Russell Smith_ 278

WHICH IS RIGHT? 288

"VERDUN BELLE" 290

ANOTHER NONSENSE TEST 296

CAN YOU UNDERSTAND RELATIONSHIP? 297

CHARADES 298

GENERAL PERSHING'S WELCOME HOME 299

THE FAIRIES ON THE GUMP _Mabel Quiller-Couch_ 303

THINKING AND DOING 312

A TRIP TO THE MOON _Charles R. Gibson_ 313

SILENT READING

The book which you are now beginning is, as its title tells you, a _silent reader_; that is, a reader that you are to read to yourself, silently. It is much more interesting to read silently than to read aloud, and it is also much faster. With all the wonderful books and valuable articles that are being printed every day, it is important that you learn to read rapidly as well as to understand.

The purpose of this book is to help you to read fast and to understand clearly what you read. You will find all sorts of reading; animal stories, poems, fairy tales, problems, descriptions of strange places, puzzles, war stories, and lots of other things. We think you will find it very interesting, but the important thing is to use all this material to make yourself a rapid and at the same time a careful reader.

Of course you are much too old to move your lips when you read. If you have this habit you must break it at once, for you will never read rapidly as long as you continue to pronounce words even to yourself. It takes just as long to pronounce a word to yourself as to read it aloud. You must learn not to do so, if you are to gain speed in reading.

Your teacher is going to help you in every possible way and will frequently time you when you read and then test you to see if you have understood what you have read. But you will have to do the most yourself if you are really to learn to read rapidly and well.

THE ESKIMO

You will be able to remember what you read and to tell about it much better if you form the habit of making a brief outline as you go along. You can learn to make this outline without writing anything down, but in the beginning it would be a good plan to write down the topics as you come to them.

At the end of this selection you will find suggestions for making an outline.

Suppose there was no grocery where you could get bread or flour or potatoes, no meat shop, no milk dealer. Make it worse and suppose there was no place where you could buy clothes, shoes, coal or wood, balls or bats, sleds or knives. Suppose you had to go without all these things unless your father and mother or brothers and sisters helped you to make them. You would all have to work very hard and even then be poor, and often hungry, cold, and wet. You could not live in town because there is not ground enough there to raise potatoes and other things to eat. You would have to live in the country, where there is more land near each home. Your father would have to learn how to build a house, how to make shoes, how to make his tools, and how to do many things which the people you know never need to think about now. Your mother would have to make even the cloth for your clothes and to prepare all the food you had. That is, your family would have to make everything that you had in your home, or that you ate, or wore, or played with, or used in the garden. They would be busy all the time. Every family would have to have more businesses or trades than you can find in some small towns, and many of the things you have now they could not make at all, so you would not have them. For a long time, a very long time, that is the way people used to live all over the world. It was a hard life. There are even yet many places where people do not use machines and where every family makes everything for its own use.

The Eskimos live that way. Their country is far away to the north. It is a very poor, cold country, where very few things will grow, so there are not many Eskimos. Robinson Crusoe tried living all by himself for a while, but he had a lot of tools from the ship, and his island was rich in food and wood. He found goats there that gave milk; he found good wild grapes and other fruits; but he said he had to work very hard, even though he did not have any family to support. The Eskimo country is much poorer than Crusoe's island. It is away up north where the winter is very long and cold, and the summer is so short that no trees grow, and there are not many other plants. The Eskimo has no animals to give milk; he never heard of potatoes or bread, to say nothing of cake.

It is hard to get the things you need in such a country. For a winter house the Eskimo often builds a little hut of snow. Many boys and girls in the cooler parts of the United States and Canada have built a little snow house for sport, but the Eskimo finds it the warmest house he can get. If it has a window, you cannot see through it, for it is a piece of fish skin that looks like dirty glass. To keep the cold out he makes the doorway so low that people must crawl in. Then he builds a long tunnel outside the door to keep the wind out, and puts a chunk of snow in the outer end of the tunnel for a door. Along the sides of the house inside is a bank of snow covered with skins. This is both chair and bed.

If he made the room as warm as we make our houses, the roof would melt and drip down his neck. But he does not have enough fire to warm it much anyhow. The little fire he has for cooking is made by burning the fat of animals in an oil lamp.

Not long ago a man named Rasmussen, whose father was a missionary in Greenland and whose mother was an Eskimo, made a long journey through Eskimo land. At one place he found a dead whale on the seashore and the Eskimos there felt as rich as we should if a carload of coal or fire-wood were dumped down in the yard. They were busy tearing off strips of the fat, called blubber, that lies under the whale's skin. Some of them were hauling it two days' journey on their sleds. Some of the people Rasmussen saw had never even heard of white men or of any of the things the white man makes. They themselves had to make everything they had.

Their boats (or kyaks) were of seal skins sewed into a water-tight sheet and stretched over a frame-work of whale rib bones and long walrus tusks, tied together with sinews and strips of leather. In these tiny boats they paddle around in the sea and catch seals with spears.

Nearly all the Eskimos live along the seashore where they can catch fish, seals and walrus. The seal is the greatest wealth the Eskimo has. The seal eats fish and keeps warm in the ice-cold water because he has a coat of soft, fine, water-proof fur, and under his skin a thick layer of fat. Seal meat is bread to the Eskimo. He cooks with seal fat and makes clothes, boats, and tents of the sealskin.

In winter the Eskimo wears two suits of fur, one with the fur inside and the other with the fur outside. In summer one suit is enough.

When spring comes and the snow house begins to melt, the Eskimo moves into his sealskin tent or into a stone hut chinked with dirt. Some of these stone huts are hundreds of years old. Toward the end of summer there are some berries that get ripe on low-growing bushes, and many bright flowers bloom in the northland. Then the Eskimos sometimes make trips inland. They eat berries, rabbit meat, birds, and wild reindeer. Wild ducks and many other birds are there in summer, but they fly away to warm lands when cold weather comes, and the people go back to the seashore to lay in their winter supply of seal meat.

The wild animals that live here all the time do not seem to mind the cold. They have warm fur, and the rabbit changes his color to keep from getting caught. He is snow white in winter so that the fox cannot see him on the snow, but in summer his coat is brown so that the fox cannot see him on the ground.

The Eskimo has one helper, the dog that pulls his sled. We call him the "huskie". This dog has a thick, warm coat so that he can curl up in the dry snow, put his four feet and his nose into a little bunch, lay his bushy tail over them, and sleep through a blinding snow storm that would freeze a white man to death. Sometimes the snow covers him entirely as he sleeps and he has to dig himself out when he wakes up.

When Admiral Peary went over the ice to the North Pole, in 1909, Eskimo dogs pulled the sleds that carried his food and tents, and Eskimo men helped him. He found them to be honest, brave men, trusty helpers, and good friends.

The Eskimos are very fond of games. They play football and several kinds of shinny, using long bones for shinny sticks. Sometimes they skate on new smooth ice, using bone skates tied fast to their soft shoes. As they do not go to school and have no books, the days must seem long in bad weather, for they have nothing to do but sit around the little fire in the dark smoky little snow house. They have many indoor games. The house is too small to play tag or run around, so they have sitting down games. There are as many as fifty kinds of string games something like our cat's cradle.

This is the simplest kind of living to be found anywhere in the world. Every family in the world needs a certain amount of food, clothes, fuel, shelter, tools, and playthings. In different countries there are different ways of getting these things, depending on the weather, on the things that will grow, and the things that man finds in the ground, or in the woods, or in the sea. Each Eskimo family must make or get all these things for itself.

The Eskimos do not need money because they do not buy nor sell. If two Eskimos should meet and want to trade two dogs for a sled, they would just trade as two schoolboys swap knives. The Eskimos would be much more comfortable if they could trade some of their sealskins for lumber to build houses and for flour and dried fruit to eat with their never ending meat. We cannot trade with them because they are too far away for us to build railroads to their land, and the sea is so full of ice that ships cannot get through it Perhaps the aeroplane will let us see more of the Eskimo.

--_J. Russell Smith. Courtesy of the John C. Winston Co._

QUESTIONS

Glance quickly at the first paragraph. How would this do as a title or topic for it: "Doing things for yourself"?

The second paragraph connects the idea that it is very hard to do everything for yourself with the various things told about the Eskimo in the rest of the story. So that you may understand better, the Eskimo is compared with Robinson Crusoe, who had to do everything for himself but had a better chance because of the country in which he lived. A topic for the second paragraph might be, "The Eskimo's life compared with Robinson Crusoe's".

Beginning with the third paragraph, the author tells how the Eskimo lives. It is not necessary to make a topic for every paragraph. We can make a general heading under which some of his ways of living can be grouped. Arrange the heading and the sub-headings as follows:

How the Eskimo manages to live.

(_a_) His house. (_b_) His food, (_c_) His clothing.

Now look through the rest of the story, and you will see that it can be included under the following headings:

The Eskimo dog. Eskimo games. Why the Eskimo does not buy and sell.

In making an outline it is not necessary to put in every single idea in the piece you are outlining.

Now, after going through the selection to see how the outline is made, you can easily answer the following questions:

1. How does it happen that you do not have to depend on your own family for the things you eat and wear and use? Make a list of the people who help you to get the things necessary for every-day life. Your list might begin with the baker, the milk-man, and the shoemaker.

2. Try to draw a picture of the outside of the Eskimo's winter house as it is described here.

3. Make a list of the things you think an Eskimo boy or girl about your age would do from morning to night--his day's program, you may call it.

4. Do you think the Eskimo is glad when summer comes? Why?

5. Tell a story that a "huskie" might tell of his experiences.

6. Make a list of raw materials, such as wood, that would make the life of the Eskimo more comfortable.

SCOTTISH BORDER WARFARE

From your study of the way to make an outline of "The Eskimo", you will be able to make an outline of "Scottish Border Warfare" yourself.

Read the selection through, and then go back and write topics that cover the main points.

Legends of the Scottish borders tell the exciting stories of a warfare that went on for a hundred years, in the days before England and Scotland were united. The "Borders" consisted of that part of the country in the South of Scotland where the boundary was not properly fixed. The King of England might claim a piece of land that the King of Scotland thought was his, and the King of Scotland might do the same by the King of England. And so, because things were never really settled in these parts, and men thought they could do pretty much as they liked, a constant warfare sprang up between the families who lived on the English side of the border and those who lived on the Scottish side. These families formed great clans, almost like the Highland clans, and every man in the clan rose in arms at the bidding of his chief.

The warfare which they carried on was not honest fighting so much as something that sounds to us very much like stealing; only in these old plundering, or "reiving" days, as they were called, people were not very particular about other people's property, and right was often decided by might. So when these old Border chieftains found that their larders were getting empty, they sent messages around the countryside to their retainers, telling them to meet them that night at some secret trysting-place, and ride with them into England to steal some English yeoman's flock of sheep.

In the darkness, groups of men, mounted on rough, shaggy ponies, would assemble at some lonely spot among the hills and ride stealthily into Cumberland or Northumberland, and surround some Englishman's little flock of sheep, or herd of cattle, and drive them off, setting fire, perhaps, to his cottage and haystacks at the same time.

The Englishman might be unable to retaliate at the moment, but no sooner were the reivers' backs turned than he betook himself with all haste to his chieftain, who, in his turn, gathered his men together, and rode over into Scotland to take vengeance, and, if possible, bring back with him a larger drove of sheep and cattle than had been stolen, or "lifted", by the Scotch.

And so things went merrily on, with raids and counter-raids, and fierce little encounters, and brave men slain. You can read the accounts of many of these raids in Sir Walter Scott's "Border Minstrelsy"--about "Kinmont Willie," "Dick o' the Cow," "Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," "Johnnie Armstrong," and "the Raid of the Reidswire"--and if you ever chance to be traveling between Hawick and Carlisle you can look out of the window, as the train carries you swiftly down Liddesdale, and people the hillsides, in your imagination, with companies of reivers setting out to harry their "auld enemies", the English.

--_From "A Peep at Scotland", by Elizabeth Grierson._

QUESTIONS

1. What were the "Borders"?

2. From the way they are used, tell what you think the following words mean: "reiving," larders, retainers, clan, trysting-place, yeoman, retaliate, "lifted," harry.

THE NEW WONDERLAND

You have probably, like Betty, the little girl in this story, read "Alice in Wonderland". If you haven't, you will find out, before you have read very far on this page, when Alice lived. Glance at the first part of the story and see.

Alice, in the book that Betty had been reading, had wonderful adventures in a strange country, where rabbits and caterpillars talked, and where certain kinds of cake made you grow taller or shorter, and where people put pepper in tea. Anybody would think a country like that was a Wonderland; but you will see that Alice found our everyday, twentieth-century world is a Wonderland, too. See if you can tell why she thought so.

Betty laid down her book with a sigh. It had been a lovely book, and she was sorry it was finished. "Such a humdrum old world!" she said discontentedly. "I wish I had a chance to go to Wonderland, like Alice."

"Why," said a voice from the doorway, "isn't this Wonderland, then?"

Betty looked up, startled. She saw a little girl of about her own age, with long, light, straight hair hanging to her waist, with wide, wondering blue eyes, and dressed in the simplest, most old-fashioned of little white frocks.

"Who are you?" inquired Betty.

"Why, don't you know me? I'm Alice," said the quaint little girl.

"How did you get here? I thought you lived a long time ago, in 1850 or so."

"Oh, yes, I did begin to live then; but you see I've been traveling in Wonderland so long that I've never had time to grow up."

"Aren't you sorry to have come back to real life, and begin to do lessons, and mind what the older people say, and all?"

"Oh, but I haven't! Of course, I suppose the people in Wonderland don't know they are queer, and so that's why you don't know you live there."

"Well," said Betty scornfully, "I'm sure I don't see anything to wonder at in this old place--" Just then a bell rang sharply, and Betty hurried to answer the telephone. It was her father speaking. She took his message and returned to her guest.

"What in the world," said Alice, "made you talk into that little black cup?"

"Why, that's the telephone."

"What's a telephone? We didn't have them in my time, I'm sure."

"Oh, everybody has one now. It lets you talk to somebody 'way off, over an electric wire."

"Of course, we read about Franklin and his kite and all that. Let me try it." But when the operator's voice saying "Number, please?" came to Alice's ear, she was so frightened that she dropped the receiver.

"I can show you lots more things we do with electricity," said Betty, beginning to understand that things which were commonplace to her were wonders to her visitor. "You see it's getting dark? Now watch." Going to the push-button in the wall she snapped on the light; Alice jumped at its suddenness.

"Why, at home we had to find matches and light a lamp," she said in amazement.

"That's nothing," said Betty. "Come along." She led her new friend into the dining room, and showed her how, by pressing a button, the rack could be heated for toasting bread, or heat supplied for the coffee pot. Then they went on into the kitchen, and she showed Alice the gas stove, where a flame sprang into life at the turning of a handle; and the washing-machine, where the pressing of another button set the clothes to churning up and down in the suds; and the electric iron, heated by the pressing of still another button.

"Why, nobody needs to do any work at all," said Alice admiringly, while Betty began to feel that after all she had a great many remarkable things in her house, which she had never thought much about because they had always been there. As they walked back into the hall, they heard a click-clicking sound.

"What's that?" said Alice.

"Oh, it's just my big brother's wireless apparatus catching a message. If he were here he could tell us what it says."