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THE BOOK SHELF 



The Trail Book, Mary Austin, 304 pp., illustrated, Houghton Mifflin Co. 



The plan of the Trail Book is charming. Two children whose father 

 was the night engineer in a museum have wonderful experiences. The boy 

 Oliver, is very imaginative and the girl, Dorcas Jane, is very matter of fact, 

 but they are both equally interested in the experience. Oliver believes 

 that the stuffed animals in the museum "came alive at night and had larks 

 of their own." The children managed to spend a part of the night in the 

 musuem "tucked into one of the window benches between the cases, the 

 children seemed to swing into another world where almost anything might 

 happen." So they sat and waited. All at once the bull Buffalo shook him- 

 self. "Wake! Wake! said the Bull Buffalo, with a roll to it, as though the 

 word had been shouted in a deep voice down an empty barrel. He shook 

 the dust out of his mane and stamped his fore-foot to set the herd in motion. 

 There were thousands of them feeding as far as -the eye could reach, across 

 the prairie, yearlings and cows with their calves of that season, and here and 

 there a bull, tossing his heavy head and sending up light puffs of dust under 

 the pawings of his hoof as he took up the leader's signal. 



"Wake! Wa— ake!" 



It rolled along the ground like thunder. At the sound the herds gathered 

 themselves from the prairie, they turned back from the licks, they rose up 

 plop from the wallows, trotting singly in the trails that rayed out to every 

 part of the pastures and led up toward the high ridges." 



Thus the Buffalo came alive and then told his story giving a description 

 of the Buffalo country which took in the cliff dwellers on the one hand and 

 the mound builders of the Mississippi valley on the other. Then the mastodon 

 takes up the tale with his story of the trail to the sea. Then the coyote 

 takes up the story of the Country of the Dry Washes which lies between the 

 Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas towards the South. Then follows the story 

 of how the corn came and many other interesting stories. The idea under- 

 lying all these stories is how the original trails across our country were made. 

 As the author says in the Appendix, "All the main travelled roads in the 

 United States began as animal or Indian trails. There is no map that shows 

 these roads as they originally were, but the changes are not so many as you 

 might think. Railways have tunneled under passes where the Buffalo went 

 over, hills have been cut away and swamps filled in, but the general direction 

 and in many places the actual grades covered by the great continental high- 

 ways remain the same." 



The stories are delightful and the book is superbly illustrated by Milo 

 Winter. Mary Austin's years of experience in the great South West and 



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