1896] " The Book of Knight and Barbara ' ' 



partly original, partly travesties on classical and Stories told 

 other tales to Knight and Barbara, who en- * cbildren 

 joyed them immensely. Some of our friends having 

 spoken of these yarns to members of the Education 

 Department interested in child-study, two graduate 

 students (Mrs. Louise Maitland and Miss Harriet 

 Hawley) brought a group of children to the house 

 to hear some of the stories. They were then taken 

 down in shorthand, after which copies were placed 

 in the hands of scores of younger pupils in Palo 

 Alto, Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Washington, D. C., 

 to be illustrated by them. More than a thousand 

 drawings were thus collected; from these, one hun- 

 dred of the cleverest were prepared by Bristow 

 Adams (then editor of Chaparral) for reproduction 

 with the stories to which they belonged. In that 

 way the volume built itself up, as it were, and on 

 my return from Bering Sea came to me practically 

 ready for publication. 



As "The Book of Knight and Barbara" it at 

 once had a large sale, its interest lying as much in 

 the pictures as in my fantastic text. 1 The quaintest 

 sketches were largely by Jenkins' daughter Alice; 2 

 the most finished, by Seward Rathbun, son of my 

 old friend at the Smithsonian. A little girl at Touthfui 

 Edmonton, Alberta, declared the collection to be cntlcs 

 "perfectly jake, perfectly peachy." But the little 

 daughter of a Boston friend remarked: "What a 

 pity they let those California children spoil this 



1 Three of my tales, "How Barbara Came to Escondite," "The Little Legs 

 That Ran Away," and "The Eagle and the Blue-tailed Skink," have given 

 pleasure to many Stanford grandchildren, while a metrical version of the Siege 

 of Troy has been the despair of classicists. Any one who may be interested will 

 find all four of these fancies in Appendix F (page 701) of the present volume. 



2 Now wife of Frank W. Weymouth, a Stanford professor. 



569 3 



