Old Greek Stories
NEW YORK: CINCINNATI: CHICAGO AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY PREFACE. Perhaps no other stories have ever been told so often or listened to with so much pleasure as the classic tales of ancient Greece. For many ages they have been a source of delight to young people and old, to the ignorant and the learned, to all who love to hear about and contemplate things mysterious, beautiful, and grand. They have become so incorporated into our language and thought, and so interwoven with our literature, that we could not do away with them now if we would. They are a portion of our heritage from the distant past, and they form perhaps as important a part of our intellectual life as they did of that of the people among whom they originated. That many of these tales should be read by children at an early age no intelligent person will deny. Sufficient reason for this is to be found
fields and meadows, are now laid out into streets and covered with
houses and shops. Indeed, I sometimes feel very aged when I look upon
places where as a boy I went fishing for small fry, and now find the
river that afforded me such juvenile sport is, owing to the enhanced
value of laud, compressed into the dimensions of a fair-sized gutter,
with houses and small factories closely packed on its margin covering
every foot of ground.
I go in another direction, and scarcely farther than the distance just
named, and I come to a spot where once stood the fine large park (Aston)
which I remember was enclosed by a brick wall on every side. Scarcely a
trace of this extensive old wall can I now see, and the site of the old
park, or nearly the whole of it, is now covered with streets and
buildings. Aston Hall, the grand old Elizabethan house built by the
Holtes in the time of Charles I., still stands in a state of good
preservation, and is fortunately now the property of the city, together
with some forty acres of surrounding land, which is, as is well known,
used as a public recreation ground.
To speak a little more in detail, I am not the only person living who
remembers "Pudding Brook" and "Vaughton's Hole." The name of "Padding
Brook" was, in my boyish days, given to a swampy area of fields now
covered by Gooch Street and surrounding thoroughfares. Pudding Brook
proper was, however, a little muddy stream that flowed or oozed along
the district named and finally emptied itself into the old moat not far
from St. Martin's Church. Vaughton's Hole, to my juvenile mind, was
NEW YORK: CINCINNATI: CHICAGO AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY PREFACE. Perhaps no other stories have ever been told so often or listened to with so much pleasure as the classic tales of ancient Greece. For many ages they have been a source of delight to young people and old, to the ignorant and the learned, to all who love to hear about and contemplate things mysterious, beautiful, and grand. They have become so incorporated into our language and thought, and so interwoven with our literature, that we could not do away with them now if we would. They are a portion of our heritage from the distant past, and they form perhaps as important a part of our intellectual life as they did of that of the people among whom they originated. That many of these tales should be read by children at an early age no intelligent person will deny. Sufficient reason for this is to be found