to this new and enlarged edition of eastern stories and legends, miss shedlock has brought years of dramatic experience in the telling of stories to children and grown people in england and america, and united with it a discriminating selection from the work of a great oriental scholar.
the result is a book of intrinsic merit for the general reading of children and of great practical value to all who are concerned with moral or ethical training.
“i feel a great joy in what these stories can unconsciously bring to the reader,” says miss shedlock in a personal letter, “the mere living among the stories for the past few weeks has given me a sense of calm and permanence which it is difficult to maintain under present outward conditions.”
i have observed with growing interest, extending over a period of years, the effect of such stories as “the folly of panic” and “the tree spirit” upon audiences of adolescent boys and girls in the public schools, public libraries, social settlements, sunday schools and private schools, i have visited with miss shedlock. there is in miss shedlock’s rendering something more than a suggestion of kinship with nature and the attributes of animal life. the story is told in an atmosphere of spiritual actuality remote from our everyday experience yet confirming its eternal truths.
my familiarity with the earlier edition of eastern stories and legends and my personal introduction of “the true spirit of a festival day” and other stories to audiences of parents and teachers, enables me to speak with confidence of the value of the book in an enlarged and more popular form.
in rearranging and expanding her selection of stories miss shedlock has wisely freed the book from limitations which gave it too much the appearance of a text book. in so doing she has preserved the classical rendering of her earlier work. her long experience as a teacher and story-teller in england and america informs her notes and arouses in the mature reader a fresh sense of the “power to educate” which rises out of all great literature at the touch of a true interpreter.
annie carroll moore
july 14, 1920.
