This lovely book contains the tales and adventures of two children in a museum where they discover the lives and folklore of Native Americans and the natural world around. This book was originally published in 1918 and is considered a classic in American Nature writing. The book is decorated with Milo Winter's fabulous ink drawing an coloured plates. Pook Press celebrates the great Golden Age of Illustration in children's literature. We are working to republish these classic works in affordable, high quality, colour editions, using the original text and artwork so these works can delight another generation of children.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him. Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear, accor-ding as he is called by friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to those who knew him by the eye's grasp only. No other fashion, I think, sets so well with the various natures that inhabit in us, and if you agree with me you will understand why so few names are written here as they appear in the geography. For if I love a lake known by the name of the man who discovered it, which endears itself by reason of the close-locked pines it nourishes about its borders, you may look in my account to find it so described. But if the Indians have been there before me, you shall have their name, which is always beautifully fit and does not originate in the poor human desire for perpetuity. Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names. Guided by these you may reach my country and find or not find, according as it lieth in you, much that is set down here. And more. The earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy for each.

Mary Austin published her autobiography in 1932 near the end of her long and creative career. "Earth Horizon" is both an account of her personal life and of her development as a writer. As always true to her special individualism, she wrote this book sometimes in the first person voice and sometimes in the third person. Using this literary device enabled her to speak frankly about her life while also commenting on the events and decisions that formed and influenced her life and writing. "Earth Horizon" is not only unique in its approach but brings a special psychological interest to the subject of autobiography. Mary Austin (nee Hunter) was born in Carlinville, Illinois in 1868 and died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1934. After graduation from Blackburn College, she moved with her family to California. She later spent time in New York and eventually settled in Santa Fe. A prolific writer, she wrote novels, short stories, essays, plays and poetry. Austin became an early advocate for environmental issues as well as the rights of women and other minority groups. She was particularly interested in the preservation of American Indian culture.

Transit becomes an act of transcendence in Mary Austin Speaker's The Bridge. I love how each section of the book ends almost where it begins, how the world comes as it goes, flash after flash - and just when things begin to blur we "awake to astonishing /geometry," to an awareness that "ascent is only a way / toward another opening." The Bridge limns with unmatched grace the internal and external process of daily passage. -Joseph MasseySuspended between home and the city, which glows abstractly in the background, The Bridge is a timely book in this age when commutes and device-driven inwardness consumes so much of our days. At times casual and at times earnest, the attention to timeand color, bodies and motion, bring heft to these svelte, track-like poems. The conceptual form of the poems echoes that of a train ride-the seemingly mundane opening and closing of the same doors, but at the exit, one is never in the same place as she was in the beginning. Speaker's poems transport readers so deftly, it's quite easy forget just how it was that you arrived. -Kyle DarganMost everything happens around us while we are in between, suspended in our own stories, and ill-prepared to be surprised. Mary Austin Speaker's The Bridge honors the potential for magic as unknowns bump up against one another during the beginnings and endings of so many everyday days: [I]t is not grace that opens / to let us burrow in / it's a chaos of reordering / which of these / is the obstacle / to understanding / how the magic happens. In these pages, we commute through the always now and the always almost,unfathomably lucky to have a skilled poet willing to look very directly and say I see you,riding in the seat next to us. -Paula Cisewski

“Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert” is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders of this region, Austin generously shares “such news of the land, of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.” Her vivid writings capture the landscape—from burnt hills to sun-baked mesas—as well as the rich variety of plant and animal life, and the few human beings who inhabit the land, including cattlemen, miners, and Paiute Indians. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the original 1903 edition.