The Boys of Grand Pre School

Boston: Lee and Shepard. G ex-library. 1871. Maroon embossed binding with gilt lettering on spine. Binding faded, foxing on tissue guard to frontis & title page. . Label on spine, pocket on ft endpaper, otherwise no library markings or bad treatment as is so often true of library copies. Interior very good. Publisher ads of Oliver Optic, Elm Island Stories, Young Hunter's Library, Jutland Series, The Frontier Series, Charley Roberts Series, Helping Hand Series, Vacation Story-Books and The Proverb Series on endpapers. Wonderful frontis of man holding turnips out to donkey on the stairs with 3 boys pushing titled "Getting the Donkey Up Stairs". One of the boys at school has been scaring the younger boys with noises at night in the cupola and so there is a plot to scare him tonight with the donkey. Two other woodcuts. "Alas, the first day of a new term! What a horror it brings to the heart of a boy! Fresh from the green fields, from the blue sky, from the fragrant woods, the babbling book, the sounding shore, the lofty precipice, the bou nding wave, -- from all these he enters into the gloom, and darkness, and confinement of the school-room. Can there be any wonder that the fresh, young boyish heart should quail...Where is his life, in which of late he so exulted?....The first day at school for a boy is homesickness in its broadest sense....not merely a pining for one's actual home, but... also a yearning for pleasures that have fled, -- some lost grace of life, - - some sweet charm which has passed away." Thus leading to the antics of school boys past. .