Christmas Every Day

William Dean Howells (1837–1920)
From American Christmas Stories

Interesting Links


“Live Like There’s No Tomorrow: The Secret History—and Science—of Time Loops” (Jonathan Holmes, The Telegraph)

“William Dean Howells and the Gilded Age” (Richard White, Oxford University Press)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Shakespeare,” William Dean Howells
• “Thurlow’s Christmas Story,” John Kendrick Bangs
• “A Christmas Party That Prevented a Split in the Church,” Margaret Black
• “The Empress’s Ring,” Nancy Hale

Buy the book
American Christmas Stories
From the Civil War era to today: 59 stories in all
List price: $29.95
Web Store price: $18.00

“The police told them to shovel their presents off from the sidewalk.” Illustration for “Christmas Every Day” by Mildred Howells (1873-1966) in The Howells Story Book (1900).

In the year 1900, William Dean Howells agreed to take over the dormant “Easy Chair” column that the editors of Harper's Monthly hoped to resurrect “in its old place in the rear of the magazine.” From 1863 until his death in 1892, George William Curtis had been responsible for the feature. Although Howells was himself quite famous and highly respected by critics and readers, he knew the bar had been set high by his predecessor.

In his first column, Howells imagined taking Curtis’s old easy chair out of storage. Awakened from its eight-year slumber, the chair begins to speak and remembers the last article Curtis had written, which was about the spirit of the holidays: “You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs little. . . . Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the extravagance?”

“That was Curtis!” the chair exclaims. “The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy, . . . the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience and the undying hopefulness! Do you think that you are fit to take his place?” The chair then challenges Howells, “What good can you find to say of Christmas?”

At first, Howells is stymied, because “in his heart he was sick of Christmas” and its excesses: the sentimental stories, the gifts, the “heavy Christmas dinners and indigestion,” and all the rest. But he responds that “for the young to whom these things are new, and for the poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources of perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard yourself from growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight of Christmas is yours forever.” After a while, Howells notices that the chair has nodded off, and he instructs the warehouse agent to return it to storage, quietly adding, “Don’t wake it.”

“The Second Christmas Morning.” One of five
illustrations by 12-year-old Mildred Howells for
the first appearance of “Christmas Every Day”
in St. Nicholas magazine.

Fourteen years earlier, in 1886, Howells had published “Christmas Every Day,” his first work written especially for children. The story combined his cynicism about the excesses of Christmas with his love for his three children and their innocent yet perceptive wonder. It appeared first in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, with five hand-drawn illustrations by an unidentified “little girl.” The young artist was in fact his 12-year-old daughter, Mildred, who grew up to become a moderately successful watercolorist and book illustrator. In 1900, Mildred provided the illustrations for The Howells Story Book, a selection of the best pieces that her father had written for children, and she used the opportunity to include a far more polished drawing for his Christmas story (reproduced above).

Howells continued to publish children’s stories after the appearance of “Christmas Every Day”; over the next six years he published four tales in the Harper’s Young People magazine and gathered them in the 1892 collection Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children, the most successful of his books for young readers. He also wrote many holiday items; during the 1880s and 1890s, he published a series of farcical one-act plays, many of which were set at Christmas and appeared in the annual Christmas number of various magazines. “They began to be acted everywhere within a week or two of their publication,” the novelist Booth Tarkington recalled, “and a college boy of the late ’eighties and golden ’nineties came home at Christmas to be either in the audience at a Howells farce or in the cast that gave it.” Howells also wrote half a dozen moderately absurd Christmas allegories for Harper’s over the same period.

Ironically, Howells did not think much of most works of holiday fiction, which he regarded as pale, formulaic successors to Charles Dickens’s Christmas tales and which had become, he wrote despairingly, a “whole school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned.” On the other hand, he respected the “new” children’s literature by the likes of Mark Twain and J. M. Barrie, written to be enjoyed by adults. “The new school of briefer fictionists, who have done so much that is of fresh truth and novel impulse in other sorts, have got rather a new turn in the heart of childhood,” he wrote in the preface for an anthology of children’s stories. “Children like to be taken seriously, and though grown-up people cannot take them quite so seriously as children would like, yet the loving irony of these writers is such as the children would not easily find them out in.”

When Howells died in 1920, he was lauded for his career as an editor, critic, and novelist, and the titles most singled out from among his more than 100 books were The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Modern Instance, and A Foregone Conclusion—often in that order. Few notices mentioned his works for children. In the century since, Howells’s star has diminished; he has become one of those authors occasionally and deservedly “rediscovered” in the pages of literary periodicals. Released into the public domain several decades ago, “Christmas Every Day” has inspired some two dozen film and television productions, from Groundhog Day to Elmo Saves Christmas to “Donald Duck: Stuck on Christmas.” The critics of Howells’s day—and almost certainly Howells himself—would have been dismayed if they been told that his little Christmas story first published in 1886 in a magazine for children would become, a century after his death, what is almost certainly the most widely read of all his works.

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The little girl came into her papa’s study, as she always did Saturday morning before breakfast, and asked for a story. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Lady of Little Fishing

Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894)
From Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories

Interesting Links

“A Horror of ‘Pretty,’ ‘Sweet’ Writing” (Stephanie Gorton Murphy, Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Sights to See on Mackinac Island: The Story Behind Anne’s Tablet” (Mackinac Island)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Miss Grief,” Constance Fenimore Woolson
• “The Legend of Monte del Diablo,” Bret Harte
• “Anna’s Whim,” Louisa May Alcott
• “Expiation,” Edith Wharton

Buy the book
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories
23 stories in all • 733 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 44%
Web store price: $22.50

Voyageurs at Dawn, 1871. Oil on canvas by British artist Frances Anne Hopkins (1838–1919). WikiCommons.

From 1858 to 1870, Frances Anne Hopkins lived in Québec with her husband, a Hudson’s Bay Company administrator soon promoted to superintendent of the Montréal department, and she accompanied him on many of his journeys to HBC stations, expeditions that took them as far as Thunder Bay on Lake Superior’s northern shore and Marquette in upper Michigan. Like the Lady in Woolson’s story, she was often the only woman at an outpost, and she made sketches of trappers, traders, and voyageurs—the French Canadian boatmen who transported furs. She transformed many of these drawings into paintings after she and her husband returned to London in 1870.

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In a blog post a few years ago, Anne Boyd Rioux resurrected a scathing notice that appeared in The Nation in 1874. “Our band of heart-wrenching female dealers in false feeling was never, we think, so numerous as now,” complained the critic John Richard Dennett. The two short stories that prompted this reaction were by Constance Fenimore Woolson: “Peter the Parson” (“noticeable for the raw coarseness of its assault on the feelings”) and “The Lady of Little Fishing,” which elicited a lengthier comment:

In the September Atlantic, Miss Woolson has another tale, wildly improbable, destitute of the truth of fact or the truth of fiction, which appears under the title of “The Lady of Little Fishing,” It is of this as much as of her story in Scribner’s that we are thinking when we speak of the large school of female writers to which she belongs, and of whom there is none who seems able to keep on her feet and write a moderate word when the reader’s feelings are to be touched, by the display of the throbbing feelings of the characters. Of the uses of restraint and of the nature of reserve they seem to have really about as much conception as if they wrote letters for the Beecher-Tilton case [in which Theodore Tilton publicly accused preacher Henry Ward Beecher of adultery]; and of good sense as little. They are, in a strict and now obsolete sense of the word, indecent.

As Rioux points out, Dennett died three months later, so he did not live to see the near-universal acclaim that greeted Woolson’s first collection, Castle Nowhere: Lake County Sketches, which reprinted both of the stories he despised. Moreover, his fellow reviewers understood immediately what Dennett, predisposed against fiction written by women, seems to have entirely missed: “The Lady of Little Fishing” is Woolson’s deliberate and obvious rewrite of (and response to) “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” the story that made Bret Harte famous just four years earlier. Harte’s tale, and the collection that contained it, proved so popular that in early 1871 William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, offered $10,000 for the exclusive rights to his work over the next year.

Before Woolson submitted “The Lady of Little Fishing” to Howells, “Solomon,” the first of her many stories to be published in The Atlantic, appeared in the October 1873 issue. “It has given me great pleasure to enter within the ‘Atlantic’ circle,” she wrote to him. “You may be amused to know that my three models, whose styles I study and admire, are George Eliot, Bret Harte, W. D. Howells. Quite unlike, are they not?” Her inclusion of Howells in this short list may have been meant as flattery, but the mention of Harte was probably not; by that time, The Atlantic had ended its costly arrangement with him. Harte’s popularity was declining, his new work was generally lacking in quality, and he had been unable to meet deadlines (his Christmas story appeared in the March issue). When Woolson sent her admiring letter to Howells, Harte was no longer a member of the “Atlantic circle.”

Although Woolson borrowed ambience and ideas from Harte’s popular tales, few readers would mistake her stories for anything written by him. “I do not plead guilty to imitating Harte,” she wrote to a new friend, the poet and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, in September 1874. “In spite of all I said to you, I only meant that his style had impressed me so deeply that it would be a wonder if something did not show to others how much he was to me.” In any case, like everyone else, she was beginning to have doubts about Harte’s stature. She asked Publishers Weekly editor R. R. Bowker, “No one admires Bret Harte more than I do; but could he write a novel? — Is his fame work not like that of the journalist, — brilliant but vanishing too soon?” Before the year 1875 was out, readers had an answer of sorts to her first question. Harte’s first and only novel, the 470-page clunker Gabriel Conroy, was published, and the reaction from both readers and critics was virtually unanimous; it was “from beginning to end hopelessly and irredeemably bad,” lamented the Saturday Review. The novel, as one of Harte’s recent biographers admits, has “sufficient plots and subplots to fill a small library” and concludes “with more loose ends than a frayed rope.” After skimming parts of the book, Woolson told Stedman that she couldn't bring herself to read it through.

In “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” the only woman in the camp (and in the story) dies shortly after childbirth. Harte immediately dismisses her importance to the tale: “Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman.” Her baby, however, is left to the care of the gruff men who populate the camp. Not only does the infant boy Luck seem to bring fortune to the miners, who suddenly begin hauling in large quantities of gold, his very presence also calms and “civilizes” the men; they become concerned over the child’s upbringing and surroundings. At the end of the story, the camp is unexpectedly destroyed by a flash flood, in which both Luck and luck are swept away.

In an invaluable reappraisal of the relationship between Woolson’s and Harte’s stories, Caroline Gebhard contends that Woolson’s “self-conscious adoption of the ultramasculine style of Bret Harte is part of her declaration of literary independence. . . . Harte’s writing seemed as far as it was possible to be from the ‘pretty and sweet’ stories supposed the natural province of women.” In other words, Woolson purposefully wrote about subjects and locales that would distinguish herself from the “female writers” scorned by Dennett. (The irony is that Harte’s story has been often criticized for being too sentimental.) As Rioux notes in her recent biography of Woolson, “Harte’s phenomenal success with stories of rough, uncivilized miners and outlaws in California woke Woolson up to the literary marketability of the West.” For her version of the story, Woolson moved the setting from the gold mines of California to the remote fur-trapping camps in the Great Lakes region. “We had a cottage at Mackinac for two summers when I was a young girl,” she wrote to Howells, “and I knew all about the islands just west of the Straits, and their lawless inhabitants.”

Woolson didn’t simply change the location and retell Harte’s story with trappers instead of miners, of course. Instead of a baby, the civilizing force is a “spotless” young woman who arrives in the camp “as though she had dropped from heaven,” to preach the gospel to the wayward inhabitants, whose names and habits are near-parodies of the residents of Roaring Camp. Thus, “Woolson subtly undermines Harte’s version of the American fantasy of a happy, all-male existence uncomplicated by women,” writes Gebhard. “Not only can there not be a story without a woman in it—even Harte’s story, after all, needs a woman to produce the wonderful baby—but also, Woolson insists, the woman is the story.” The introduction of the Lady into this environment alters the entire thrust of the original story, and the camp’s history ends because of human behavior rather than a random natural catastrophe. As the scholar Alfred Bendixen puts it, “Woolson's focus is on the ways in which men construct women into objects of fantasy that meet their own emotional needs while ignoring the reality embodied in every complex human being.”

In the end, although the two tales mirror each other and share various elements, Woolson’s story is so different that readers need not have read Harte to understand or enjoy it. “The Lady of Little Fishing” has been reprinted for posterity in the recent Library of America volume collecting the best of Woolson’s stories, and we present it below as our Story of the Week selection.

Notes: The North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, competing fur-trading firms in British North America, were forced to merge in 1821 by the British government after a series of skirmishes between the two companies. Bateaux were broad flat-bottomed boats used primarily for transporting men, supplies, and goods in colonial North America and during the fur trade.

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It was an island in Lake Superior. I beached my canoe there about four o’clock in the afternoon, for the wind was against me and a high sea running. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Passing of Sister Barsett

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
From Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
“Willa Cather’s preface to Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, 1925” (Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project)

“The Story Behind the 1908 Sarah Orne Jewett Letter from Willa Cather” (Andy Jewell, Yours, Willa Cather)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Autumn Holiday,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “Luella Miller,” Mary Wilkins Freeman
• “Petrified Man,” Eudora Welty

Buy the book
Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels & Stories
Deephaven | A Country Doctor | The Country of the Pointed Firs | 28 stories | 937 pages

“ ‘I guess your friends will stand by you,’ said Mrs. Crane.” Illustration by Canadian artist Henry Sandham (1842–1912) for Jewett’s story when it appeared in the May 1892 issue of Cosmopolitan.

Near the end of 1891 William Dean Howells, the influential books columnist for Harper’s Monthly and former editor of Atlantic Monthly, agreed to assume the co-editorship of Cosmopolitan. Working with John Brisben Walker, the magazine’s millionaire owner who had rescued the publication from bankruptcy two years earlier, Howells planned to do “something for humanity as well as the humanities,” elevating the magazine’s contents from its current fare of light fiction and household tips. The circulation for Cosmopolitan had skyrocketed under Walker's oversight to a quarter of a million and would nearly double again in the next three years, and the huge national audience—combined with the outlandishly extravagant salary offered by Walker—convinced Howells to take the job. “Unquestionably Mr. Howells will be a greater power than ever in the radical wing of American literature,” wrote one reporter. Unfortunately, his progressive attitudes toward literary and social writing clashed with Walker’s commercial interests, not to mention the millionaire’s headstrong and unpredictable personality, and Howells quit after only a few months at the helm.

Before Howells resigned, however, he had invited pieces from several top-notch authors whose bylines would probably have otherwise never graced its pages—and who were convinced not only by the addition of Howells’s name on the masthead but also by the exorbitant rates Cosmopolitan paid its contributors. He directed one of his first letters to Sarah Orne Jewett, whom Howells had introduced to a national audience when, twenty years earlier, he published several of her earliest tales in the Atlantic. Howells had just reviewed her latest story collection for his Harper’s column, praising “Miss Jewett’s New England studies [for] not only the delightful mood in which these little masterpieces are imagined, but the perfect artistic restraint.” When he wrote to Jewett, he urged her to send him “the very first sketch” she finished and reminded her that the owner was not “meeching about the pay.”

It’s a curious word, meeching; it is scattered throughout Jewett’s stories and novels, and it has a variety of meanings. A New Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1902, tells us, “This word, which is a true archaism of very respectable lineage, still survives in New York and New England, in sense of skulking, sly, sneaking, or underhand.” It can also refer variously to someone who is falsely humble or who complains in private or (as Howells uses it) who deceitfully claims to be poor or ill. In Jewett’s world, biographer Paula Blanchard notes, “Meeching people run out on their responsibility to God, themselves, and their community, and because they feel guilty about it they are a fairly noisy bunch.”

Blanchard points to the title character of “The Passing of Sister Barsett” as “a meecher of real distinction”—although Jewett doesn’t use the word in the story itself. (Coincidentally, it’s the story that Howells published in Cosmopolitan.) When two women receive news of Sister Barsett’s death, they launch into a stream of disparaging gossip against the dearly departed woman who was “the first to have all the new diseases that’s visited this region.” It turns out that both Sarah Ellen Dow, the disgruntled nurse who had been single-handedly caring for Sister Barsett, and Mercy Crane, a well-to-do widow whose staunches her loneliness by accosting passers-by for conversation and news, have plenty to say about their meeching neighbor.

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Mrs. Mercy Crane was of such firm persuasion that a house is meant to be lived in, that during many years she was never known to leave her own neat two-storied dwelling-place on the Ridge road. . . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

A White Heron

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
From Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“Sylvia as Hero in Sarah Orne Jewett's ‘A White Heron’” (Kelley Griffith Jr., The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project)

“But Were They Gay? The Mystery of Same-Sex Love in the 19th Century” (Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, The Atlantic)

Previous selections by Sarah Orne Jewett
• “An Autumn Holiday”
• “Tom’s Husband”

Buy the book
Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels & Stories
Deephaven | A Country Doctor | The Country of the Pointed Firs | 28 stories | 937 pages

Great Egret, 1821. Watercolor, graphite, pastel,
gouache, white lead pigment, black ink, and
blackchalk on paper by John James Audubon .
This painting was not included by Audubon in
Birds of America. Image courtesy of New-York
Historical Society website.

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In the mid-1880s, after the Atlantic Monthly turned down Sarah Orne Jewett’s newest story, her longtime champion William Dean Howells (who had resigned from the magazine’s editorship a few years earlier) explained that it might have been rejected because tastes had changed in favor of realism. “Mr. Howells thinks that this age frowns upon the romantic, that it is no use to write romance any more,” Jewett wrote to her friend and companion Annie Fields, “but dear me, how much of it there is left in every-day life after all. It must be the fault of the writers that such writing is dull, but what shall I do with my ‘White Heron’ now she is written? She isn’t a very good magazine story, but I love her, and I mean to keep her for the beginning of my next book.”

As one scholar speculates, “The Atlantic editors probably did not know what to make of this work of fantasy from a normally down-to-earth local color realist. But the story is much more than a simple fantasy.” Confident of the story’s worth, Jewett kept her word and used it as the opening selection—and title story—of her next book. Her instincts proved correct; readers were universally delighted, and nearly every contemporary reviewer of the book singled out “A White Heron” for praise. The popular writer Mary Wilkins Freeman was moved to send a fan letter, admitting “I never wrote any story equal” to it. The critic for the Overland Monthly exclaimed that the story “is perfect in its way—a tiny classic. One little episode of child-life, among birds and woods makes it up; and the secret soul of a child, the appeal of the bird to its instinctive honor and tenderness, never were interpreted with more beauty and insight.” And perhaps most ironically, the reviewer for The Nation praised the collection yet pointedly found in this so-called romance “no breath of romanticism or taint of literary sentimentality.”

In recent decades “A White Heron” has found new life as feminist scholars have “rediscovered” Jewett’s writing and reconsidered the story’s themes. Numerous theorists point out that it mimics and then subverts the old-fashioned fairy tale, in which the arrival of a princely figure—a “friendly lad, who proved to be most kind and sympathetic”—challenges a young, sheltered girl to reassess her place in the world.

All of which explains why this rejected magazine submission remains Jewett’s most celebrated story, ubiquitous to this day in literature anthologies and on classroom reading lists.

Note: The term bangeing was New England dialect for idling, loafing, or taking advantage of another’s hospitality.

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The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Shakespeare

William Dean Howells (1837–1920)
From Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now

Interesting Link
Interview with James Shapiro on Americans’ 200-year fascination with Shakespeare (Reader’s Almanac)

Audio documentary: Shakespeare in American Life (Folger Shakespeare Library, narrated by Sam Waterston)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “When I Knew Stephen Crane,” Willa Cather
• “Stage Struck,” Channing Pollock

Buy the book
Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now
Poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, movie reviews, comedy routines, and more • 755 pages
List price: $35.00
Save 35%, free shipping Web store price: $22.75

Detail from Scene from The Tempest, c. 1850, oil on canvas American painter William Trost Richards (1833–1905).

In 1895 the eminent novelist, critic, and editor William Dean Howells (known widely as “the Dean of American Letters”) published the memoir My Literary Passions, which detailed those authors and books that had influenced him in his younger years. Willa Cather, then a college senior writing reviews (often exacting and harsh) of books and of local theater productions for the daily Nebraska State Journal, panned the book. “Certainly now in his old age [he was fifty-eight] Mr. Howells is selecting queer titles for his books. ‘Passions,’ literary or otherwise, were never Mr. Howells’ forte.”

Although Cather’s opinion of Howells was in part shaped by her preference for Romanticism over the new American realism, her impression of the book also seems to have been influenced by her distaste for where it had appeared in serial form the previous year, “strung out in the Ladies’ Home Journal along with those thrilling articles about how Henry Ward Beecher tied his necktie and what kind of coffee Mrs. Hall Cain likes.” A few months later Cather expanded her loathing for the magazine into an entire essay: “The standards of popular journalism in this sweet land of liberty have always been a little bit peculiar, but the Ladies’ Home Journal can certainly claim the honor of having first reached the line of complete literary emancipation.”

Cather’s opinion of Howells (and, more significantly, of realism) softened considerably as she got older. She was delighted to be a guest at his 75th birthday gala in New York in 1912, and she received the 1930 William Dean Howells Medal, awarded only once every five years, for her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. And the capstone irony is that, in 1932, when she was fifty-eight, each of the last three short stories Cather published during her lifetime  appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Howells devoted an entire month’s installment from the magazine series to recalling his youthful “passion” for Shakespeare. In the 1840s, as a small boy browsing in his parents’ library, Howells was entranced by the volume of Shakespeare “in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me in like manner with its wood-cuts.” Like so many other American boys and girls of the nineteenth century—indeed, like the undergraduate critic Willa Cather two generations later—Howells became obsessed with the plays, both in print and on the stage. Presented below, the selection is preceded by a biographical note written by James Shapiro, editor of The Library of America’s just-published Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now.

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The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been none before, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events so filling that they left little room for any other excitement but that of getting acquainted with the young people of the village, and going to parties, and sleigh rides, and walks, and drives, and picnics, and dances, and all the other pleasures which that community seemed to indulge beyond any other we had known. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.