Hamilton Holt 
Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans [PDF ebook] 
As Told by Themselves

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. When you propose to tell a story to children they interrupt at the first sentence with the question, Is it a true story? As we evade or ignore this natural and pertinent inquiry they finally cease to ask it, and we blur for them the edges of reality until it fades off into the mists. The hardest part of the training of the scientist is to get back the clear sight of his childhood. But nowadays our educators do not do quite so much as formerly to eu courage the mythopeic faculty of children. It has been found that their imagination can be exercised by other objects than the imag inary. Consequently the number of readers who are impatient of any detectable deviation from truth is increasing.