in 1820, a certain Englishman’s contemptuous question “Who reads an American book?” was forever answered. Everybody read, and still reads, “Rip Van Winkle”[1] and “The legend of Sleepy Hollow,” two of the pieces in _The sketch book_. It is for these two stories particularly that I have chosen _The sketch book_ as the first reading in this course. I envy the man who has never read them. He has two evenings of pure chuckles in store for him. Shiftless, lazy Rip! The dear old toper is as real a person as George Washington, and so much more human! “There is no finer character-sketch in our literature than the lovable old vagabond, as he goes slouching through the village, his arms full of children, a troop of dogs at his heels, and the shrill pursuing voice of Dame Winkle dying away in the distance.” I lived long enough ago to see Joseph Jefferson play the part of Rip—one of the sinful sweet memories of my Methodist youth! Rip made it hard for Mrs. Van Winkle, and she made it hard for him—and there is much to be said on both sides. “The legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a twin story of the early Dutch settlements along the Hudson, in which you will make the acquaintance of another immortal character, one schoolmaster by the name of Ichabod Crane. Comment is unnecessary. Irving is to be read, like most story-tellers, and enjoyed. If you like his poetic, tender, genial, and humorous style there will be nothing in this course which you will not enjoy. For this is a reading program, not one of study. It kills real literature to study it. Take James Fenimore Cooper, our first, and still our greatest adventure writer, and read—I don’t know which to say of the Leatherstocking Tales! If I say _The last of the Mohicans_, then I will wish I had said _The deerslayer_, the first of the series, of which _The pathfinder_ and _The pioneers_, and _The prairie_ are the rest. And if I say one of these tales of the Indians, then I can’t ask you to read _The pilot_, one of the best sea stories ever written, and one of the first; nor can I tell you that you ought, by all means, to read _The spy_, which to my thinking, for sheer suspense, for escape, for pathos, and nobleness of character, beats any other book of adventure I know. But it is the vast woods and prairies, the Indian, and that early pioneer life of the frontier that Cooper does best, and upon which rests his fame. No one else will ever again paint for us, on so mighty a canvas, with such fresh and splendid colors, the scenes of that white-man-red-man time. Read THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS All five of these great tales are five acts in the thrilling drama of Leatherstocking’s life, the most complete character in literature, starting as a young hunter in _The deerslayer_ and disappearing westward, an old man, in _The prairie_, shouldering his gun, calling his dogs, hitting his last trail. Those five books are our great American epic.