You are here: Home / Charles Dudley Warner We read through one of my favorites, Being a Boy (1877) by Charles Dudley Warner, a few years ago. Not too long ago I had occasion to recommend it to a mom who was looking for something different for her boys to read. Offered the usual caveats. She said something like, “That’s okay. We just
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If Charles Dudley Warner sounds familiar to you, you may go to the head of the class. We read his Being a Boy (1877) last fall. What a wonderful book that is. I recall many of you enjoying reading about those times. Here are all of the posts excerpting passages. And here’s a favorite, The
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We’ve made our way to the end. I’m not excerpting anything from the final chapter because it’s too disjointed from the rest of the book. I don’t care for it. Today, being Friday, I’ll just circle ‘round to the first few sentences again. “One of the best things in the world to be is a
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“It is impossible to say at what age a New England country-boy becomes conscious that his trousers-legs are too short, and is anxious about the part of his hair and the fit of his woman-made roundabout. These harrowing thoughts come to him later than to the city lad. At least, a generation ago he served
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“This was the lie. One afternoon at school, just before John’s class was to recite in geography, his pretty cousin, a young lady he held in great love and respect, came in to visit the school. John was a favorite with her, and she had come to hear him recite. As it happened, John felt
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“The New England country-boy of the last generation never heard of Christmas. There was no such day in his calendar. If John ever came across it in his reading, he attached no meaning to the word. “If his curiosity had been aroused, and he had asked his elders about it, he might have got the
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“One day on his way to school a woodchuck crossed the road before him, and John gave chase. The woodchuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple-tree. John thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood under the tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon the woodchuck dropped down
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“In my day maple-sugar-making used to be something between picnicking and being shipwrecked on a fertile island, where one should save from the wreck tubs and augers, and great kettles and pork, and hen’s eggs and rye-and-indian bread, and begin at once to lead the sweetest life in the world. I am told that it
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“John had been many a time to the house of Deacon Mayhew, and never with any hesitation, even if he knew that both the deacon’s daughters—Melinda and Sophronia were at home. The only fear he had felt was of the deacon’s big dog, who always surlily watched him as he came up the tan-bark walk,
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“The evening to which I refer was that of John’s first party. He knew the girls at school, and he was interested in some of them with a different interest from that he took in the boys. “But now John was invited to a regular party. There was the invitation, in a three-cornered billet, sealed
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“What I liked best at school, however, was the study of history,—early history,—the Indian wars. We studied it mostly at noontime, and we had it illustrated as the children nowadays have “object-lessons,” though our object was not so much to have lessons as it was to revive real history.” An object lesson is a teaching method that consists of
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