Front Matter

Columbus at the Court of Spain.

Preface

I Have sometimes wondered if every one realized how startlingly independent and isolated a historical fact is to a child. It has happened before his remembrance, and that alone is enough to put it into another world. It is outside of his own little experience. It has appeared to him by no familiar road, but from the unknown regions of space. This is especially true in the study of the history of our own country. The wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean on the map, the tale of the long voyage that preceded the discovery or the settlement, remove it from the European background which to older readers gives reality to the account of the beginnings and progress of civilizations in the New World.

Not only to bring together stories of some of the interesting events of European history, but to choose those events which have realation to the story of the United States, those which lead up to it and explain it; to picture scenes in the history of the chief nations fo Europe and to make familiar the names of some of the prominent figures in those scenes; to show with what equipment of knowldge and tradition and achievement the founders of this country left their European homes;—in short, to give the child in his degree and approximation to the background for the study of our country's history which a wide reading gives to the man—such is the object of this book.

Worcester, Massachusetts,
February 24, 1909.