The first part of this volume consists of stories by modern writers dealing mainly with life in our own day. They are, of course, meant for the older children, and both the style and the situations call for more maturity on the part of the reader. The lure of the extraordinary is now dispensed with, and instead these tales supply the interest that comes from recognizable truth to experience. The list of fiction contained in this volume, representing the imaginative product of almost all races and times, is fitly closed by the gift made to the children of England of a story for themselves by the master of English novelists, William Makepeace Thackeray. - Summary by William Patten