“You don’t rickollect her, I reckon? No; you wasn’t a year old then! And now yer--how old _air_ you? W’y, child, not ‘_twenty_’! When? And yer nex’ birthday’s in Aprile? and you want to git married that day? I wisht yer mother was livin’!--but I hain’t got nothin’ to say! Twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found! There’s a straw ketched onto yer dress there--I’ll bresh it off--turn round. (Her mother was jest twenty when us two run away.) Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!” The drolleries of childhood have furnished Mr. Riley subjects for some of his most original and popular verses. Here, again, he does not accept the conventional children of literature, whom he calls “the refined children, the very proper children--the studiously thoughtful, poetic children”; but he seeks “the rough-and-tumble little fellows ‘in hodden gray,’ with frowzly heads, begrimed but laughing faces, and such awful vulgarities of naturalness, and crimes of simplicity, and brazen faith and trust, and love of life and everybody in it!” It is in this spirit that he presents now the naïve, now the perversely erring, and again the eerie and elfish child. He is a master of those enchantments of childhood that transfigure and illumine and create a world of the imagination for the young that is undiscoverable save to the elect few. He does not write patronizingly to his audience; but listens, as one should listen in the realm of childhood, with serious attention, and then becomes an amanuensis, transcribing the children’s legends and guesses at the riddle of existence in their own language. “The Raggedy Man” is not a romantic figure; he is the shabby chore-man of the well-to-do folk in the country town, and the friend and oracle of small boys. His mind is filled with rare lore, he-- “Knows ’bout Giunts, an’ Griffuns an’ Elves An’ the Squidgicum-Squees ’at swallers therselves!” And he may be responsible, too, for “Little Orphant Annie’s” knowledge of the “Gobble-uns,” which Mr. Riley turned into the most successful of all his juvenile pieces. He reproduces most vividly a child’s eager, breathless manner of speech, and the elisions and variations that make the child-dialect. Interspersed through “The Child World,” a long poem in rhymed couplets, are a number of droll juvenile recitatives; but this poem has a much greater value than at first appears. It presents an excellent picture of domestic life in a western country town, and the town is Mr. Riley’s own Greenfield, on the National Road. This poem is a faithful chronicle, lively and humorous, full of the local atmosphere, and never dull. The descriptions of the characters are in Mr. Riley’s happiest vein: the father of the house, a lawyer and leading citizen; the patient mother; the children with their various interests, leading up to “Uncle Mart,” the printer, who aspired to be an actor--