Longfellow-An April Day.

Lowell-The Dandelion, and What Is so Rare as a Day in June? Whittier-First Flowers.

Wordsworth-To the Small Celandine, The Daffodils, The First Swallow.

From St. Nicholas-When the Apple Blossoms Stir, Waiting for May, Forward March, The Bluebird's Song, Waiting to Grow, Daffy Down Dilly, Ready for Duty. See Wisconsin Free Library Commission for Suggestions for Nature Study.

CHAPTER II

LETTERS CHARACTERIZED BY THE USE OF THE DIFFERENT DISCOURSE-FORMS

I. LETTERS IN WHICH THE USE OF THE NARRATIVE IS PROMINENT.

Are you really interested in my life? and do you really wish to hear my story so much? Well, I have not always been an Arm-Chair as I am now. I can remember when I was a tree near the blacksmith shop and my branches bent over it and covered it with its beautiful green leaves. The bees came among my leaves and made me happy and my blos

soms filled the air with sweet fragrance. In the autumn when I had on my satin burs, the children used to call out, "Oh, the chestnuts are falling," and they would gather them and take them home, and the mother would say, "Where did you get the chestnuts?" and the children would answer, "Oh, the grand old tree gave them to us."

I never shall forget the smith when I was to be cut down. He wept very bitterly; but the school children of Cambridge paid some man to make me into an arm-chair, as you see me now, for the poet. I was given to him on his birthday, and old and white-haired as he was, he felt like a youth again. My life has been a very happy one and all because of the poet who sang of me when I was a young flourishing tree. Now good-by, I am glad that you asked me to tell you about myself.

Your friend,

THE OLD ARM-CHAIR.

a. After the manner of the above letter write to some one in the name of the Washington Elm at Cambridge.

b. Use the following data for stories that you tell to some particular person:

(i) Time: Early summer evening after a hard rain.

Place: Under a railroad bridge in Illinois,

three miles from the nearest station.

Chief Personage: A boy of seventeen

years. Circumstances:

The young man noticed

that the rain had loosened a pier of the bridge.

Supply setting; fill out incident and invent an ending to suit yourself.

some friend of the event.

(ii) Time: Early evening.

Place: Front doorstep of a city.

Write to

Persons: A lady visitor and a telegraph messenger.

Circumstances: The boy returns to the lady a five-dollar gold piece which she through mistake had given him the day before, for a penny, in making the change.

c. Write the story:

Of the petrified Fern.

Of the horse in The Bell of Atri.

Of some family relic, as a clock, a chest, an old spoon.

Of the Poet's Arm-Chair.

d. Write from Fredericksburg in the time of Barbara Frietchie, and tell her story as if you had been an on-looker as she waved the flag out the window.

e. Reproduce as if a participant in the event, any one of the following selections:

(i) Paul Revere's Ride.

(ii) Horatius at the Bridge.

(iii) Pheidippides (by Browning).

(iv) Echetlos (by Browning).

(v) Donald (by Browning), also, The Pied Piper.

(vi) Hawthorne's (Stories from) Twice Told Tales, The Wonder Book, Mosses from an Old Manse.

(vii) Longfellow's The Wreck of the Hesperus, The Legend Beautiful, Birds of Killingworth, stories from Hiawatha.

(viii) See Beasley's stories from Rome; Baldwin's stories of Siegfried and of Roland; Southey's The Inchcape Rock, Kipling's The Brushwood Boy; stories from the Bible, from the Iliad and Odyssey; Warner's Hunting of the Deer, and Ernest Thompson Seton's stories.

(ix) Whittier's Nauhaught the Deacon, Abraham Davenport, Conductor Bradley, The Witch's Daughter.

(x) Wordsworth's Heart Leap Well, We are Seven.