YOUR

TO BOYS

You

SOME

AND GIRLS EVERYWHERE will find some day, my little friends, that though words pretend to say what you mean, they do not say what you really mean at all, and can tell you all I want to say to you and

Yet it is your book, and the story of it

I do not know of any words that
all that this book means to me.
belongs to you; and here it is.
OMEWHERE, in a corner of the world that a mother knows, is a little
lonely girl, the gentlest little fairy who ever opened her eyes to sce
the sun.
When Master Jack Frost wakes up from his sleep and drives the
children in, our little fairy rides on her rocking-horse to Fairyland, or rings
the bell on her toy shop door and pretends to sell things to somebody who is
not there, or puts her dolls to bed long before it is time, or tells her bear the
strangest stories that ever were heard. When the sun is high in the sky, she
sets to work with her spade to turn the earth upside down, or talks to the
fairies in the trees, or begs Robin Redbreast to come down and be friends.

AND

ND, though Robin does not come down to her because bad boys with stones and catapults have made him afraid of all things that have hands, our little maid has friends in every flower that grows, in every wind that blows; and at night, as the great sun goes to his bed in the west, and the dark creeps over the world; as the days begin and end, as the weeks go by, and the months roll on, and the years begin to come, her little mind grows great with wonder, and she finds that behind the world and its play, behind all that she can see and hear and feel and know, is Something that she does not see and hear and feel and know, Something great and powerful that she cannot understand.

ND

AN

so there comes into her mind the great wonder of the earth. What does the world mean? And why am I here? So the questions come, until the mother of our little maid is more puzzled than the little maid herself. And as the questions come, when the mother has thought and thought, and answered this and answered that, until she can answer no more, she cries out for a book: "Oh, for a book that will answer all the questions!" And this is the book she cried for. "HAT is how our book began to be. Let us think that we are sitting THAT by the fire, little and big children everywhere, with story-tellers and wise men to talk to us. If we ask for stories, we shall get them. If we are very, very little people and ask for little tales and rhymes, we shall get them too. If we are growing up to wonder how the world was made, and how the flowers grow, and why the sky is blue-or if we are bigger still and go to school-we shall find that all we want to know is in our book. Such a big book must have a big name, but you will learn to say it easily, and you will know when you grow up that it is the only name that would really do. The name is the biggest word in all the book, for all that wise men know is written here so that we can understand.

IT

is a Big Book for Little People, and it has come into the world to make your life happy and good. That is what we are meant to be. That is what we must be. That is what we will help each other to be.

THE PLAN OF THE CHILDREN'S ENCYCLOPAEDIA

THE CHILDREN'S ENCYCLOPÆDIA is ar

ranged so that any boy or girl can understand it. It is not arranged as an encyclopædia usually is, because that would have destroyed the whole plan and purpose of the work.

The usual object of an encyclopædia is to put facts together in alphabetical order so that a busy man may find them quickly. That is quite proper and convenient for the man who wishes to look up something that he has forgotten, and it is, therefore, a useful plan for a book which is wanted only to refer to sometimes. But it would never do for

a book which is to be read through from beginning to end. This is an encyclopædia that teaches everything, and not merely a book full of facts.

It would have been easy to arrange the book in A B C order, but we should not then have been able to learn from it as we can now. The editor believes that the book is arranged in such a way that those who read it will be able to learn all that they can know about our own life and the world.

The book brings the story of everything into fourteen divisions, which are all given below, with the names of their writers.

EACH division begins in the first part of

the work and continues in each part until the division is complete. It is quite easy, when reading the story of anything in the book, to turn to what came before it or to what comes after it, as the beginning of each chapter bears the number of the page from which it is continued, and at the end of each chapter is the number of the page on which the next chapter begins.

The pictures are arranged so that they can be understood even without reading the chapters in which they come. The paragraphs in black type at the beginning of

many stories explain what the story is about, so that we may understand quite clearly what we are going to read.

When the CHILDREN'S ENCYCLOPÆDIA is complete we shall be able to find anything in any part of it quite easily with the help of the big index at the end. The special covers now being prepared by the editor, in which the volumes should be bound, will make it quite easy to find anything in any volume by looking up a word in the index; and when the book is complete there will be hardly any kind of information that a boy or girl may want which will not be found quite easily within its pages.