When I read gold treasures of literature--Vergil, it may be, or a Browning, or Kipling--I am enchanted and enthralled. I marvel at these people and how they can write. I think how marvelous is writing, at last--but how gladly and thankfully, after two hours or three, I return back to these my young-books of Trowbridge. They are about people living on farms, and they are written so that you know that red-root grows among wheat-spears, and must be weeded out, and that the farmer’s boys have to milk the cows mornings before breakfast and evenings after supper. For they have supper in the Trowbridge books--and it is even attractive and tastes good. When the lads go to gather kelp to spread on the land, and are gone for the day by the seashore, they eat roasted ears of corn, and cold-boiled eggs, and bread-and-butter, and three bottles of spruce beer--and if you really know the Trowbridge books you can eat of these with them, and with a wonderful appetite. When a slim boy of sixteen goes to hunt for his uncle’s horse that had been stolen in the night (because the boy left the stable door unlocked), along pleasant country roads and smiling farms in Massachusetts--if you really know the Trowbridge books--the slim boy of sixteen is not more anxious to find the horse than you are. When the boy and the reader first start after the horse they are far too wretched and anxious to eat--for the crabbed uncle told them they needn’t come back to the farm without that horse. But long before noon they are glad enough that they have a few doubled slices of buttered bread to eat as they go. When at last they come upon the horse calmly feeding under a cattle-shed at a county fair twenty miles away, they are quite hungry, and in their joy they purchase a wedge of pie and some oyster crackers, so that they needn’t be out of sight of the horse while they eat. And the reader--if he really knows the Trowbridge books--would fain stop here, for there is trouble ahead of him. He would fain--but he can not. He must go on--he must even come in crucial contact with Eli Badger’s hickory club--he must go with the boy until he sees him and the horse at last safely back at Uncle Gray’s farm, the horse placidly munching oats in his own stall, and the boy eating supper once more with appetite unimpaired, and the crabbed uncle once more serene. And--if you know Trowbridge’s books--you can eat, too, tranquilly.