match or a football triumph could present a finer appeal to boys and
girls than the description of the Peacestead in the "Heroes of Asgaard":

"This was the playground of the Aesir, where they practiced trials of
skill one with another and held tournaments and sham fights. These last
were always conducted in the gentlest and most honorable manner; for the
strongest law of the Peacestead was that no angry blow should be struck
or spiteful word spoken upon the sacred field."

For my part, I would unhesitatingly give to boys and girls an element
of strong romance in the stories which are told them even before they
are twelve.

Miss Sewell says:

"The system that keeps girls in the schoolroom reading simple stories,
without reading Scott and Shakespeare and Spenser, and then hands them
over to the unexplored recesses of the Circulating Library, has been
shown to be the most frivolizing that can be devised." She sets forth
as the result of her experience that a good novel, especially a
romantic one, read at twelve or fourteen, is really a beneficial thing.

At present, so many of the children from the elementary schools get
their first idea of love, if one can give it such a name from vulgar
pictures displayed in the shop windows or jokes on marriage, culled
from the lowest type of paper, or the proceedings of a divorce court.

What an antidote to such representation might be found in the stories
of Hector and Andromache, Siegfried and Brunnehilde, Dido and Aeneas,
Orpheus and Eurydice, St. Francis and St. Clare!