Madam How and Lady Why | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition.

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY

PREFACE

My dear boys,--When I was your age, there were no such children's
books as there are now. Those which we had were few and dull, and the
pictures in them ugly and mean: while you have your choice of books
without number, clear, amusing, and pretty, as well as really instructive,
on subjects which were only talked of fifty years ago by a few learned
men, and very little understood even by them. So if mere reading of
books would make wise men, you ought to grow up much wiser than us
old fellows. But mere reading of wise books will not make you wise
men: you must use for yourselves the tools with which books are made
wise; and that is-- your eyes, and ears, and common sense.
Now, among those very stupid old-fashioned boys' books was one
which taught me that; and therefore I am more grateful to it than if it
had been as full of wonderful pictures as all the natural history books
you ever saw. Its name was Evenings at Home; and in it was a story
called "Eyes and no Eyes;" a regular old-fashioned, prim, sententious
story; and it began thus:-
"Well, Robert, where have you been walking this afternoon?" said Mr.
Andrews to one of his pupils at the close of a holiday.
Oh--Robert had been to Broom Heath, and round by Camp Mount, and
home through the meadows. But it was very dull. He hardly saw a
single person. He had much rather have gone by the turnpike-road.
Presently in comes Master William, the other pupil, dressed, I suppose,
as wretched boys used to be dressed forty years ago, in a frill collar,
and skeleton monkey-jacket, and tight trousers buttoned over it, and
hardly coming down to his ancles; and low shoes, which always came
off in sticky ground; and terribly dirty and wet he is: but he never (he

says) had such a pleasant walk in his life; and he has brought home his
handkerchief (for boys had no pockets in those days much bigger than
key-holes) full of curiosities.
He has got a piece of mistletoe, wants to know what it is; and he has
seen a woodpecker, and a wheat-ear, and gathered strange flowers on
the heath; and hunted a peewit because he thought its wing was broken,
till of course it led him into a bog, and very wet he got. But he did not
mind it, because he fell in with an old man cutting turf, who told him
all about turf-cutting, and gave him a dead adder. And then he went up
a hill, and