WHAT I KNOW ABOUT GARDENING _Charles Dudley Warner_ (From _My Summer in a Garden_) THE SINGING MAN _Josephine Preston Peabody_ THE DANCE OF THE BON-ODORI _Lafcadio Hearn_ (From _Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan_, Volume I, Chapter VI) LETTERS: THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (From _The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_ by Ferris Greenslet) THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH TO E.S. MORSE (By permission of Professor Morse) WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY TO JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY (From _Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody_) BRET HARTE TO HIS WIFE (From _The Life of Bret Harte_ by Henry C. Merwin) LAFCADIO HEARN TO BASIL HALL CHAMBERLAIN (From _Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn_) CHARLES ELIOT NORTON TO WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (From _Letters of Charles Eliot Norton_) EXERCISES IN DRAMATIC COMPOSITION MODERN BOOKS FOR HOME READING MODERN PROSE AND POETRY FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS A DAY AT LAGUERRE'S F. HOPKINSON SMITH It is the most delightful of French inns, in the quaintest of French settlements. As you rush by in one of the innumerable trains that pass it daily, you may catch glimpses of tall trees trailing their branches in the still stream,--hardly a dozen yards wide,--of flocks of white ducks paddling together, and of queer punts drawn up on the shelving shore or tied to soggy, patched-up landing-stairs. If the sun shines, you can see, now and then, between the trees, a figure kneeling at the water's edge, bending over a pile of clothes, washing,--her head bound with a red handkerchief. If you are quick, the miniature river will open just before you round the curve, disclosing in the distance groups of willows, and a rickety foot-bridge perched up on poles to keep it dry. All this you see in a flash. But you must stop at the old-fashioned station, within ten minutes of the Harlem River, cross the road, skirt an old garden bound with a fence and bursting with flowers, and so pass on through a bare field to the water's edge, before you catch sight of the cosy little houses lining the banks, with garden fences cutting into the water, the arbors covered with tangled vines, and the boats crossing back and forth. I have a love for the out-of-the-way places of the earth when they bristle all over with the quaint and the old and the odd, and are mouldy with the picturesque. But here is an in-the-way place, all sunshine and shimmer, with never a fringe of mould upon it, and yet you lose your heart at a glance. It is as charming in its boat life as an old Holland canal; it is as delightful in its shore life as the Seine; and it is as picturesque and entrancing in its sylvan beauty as the most exquisite of English streams.