Scouting, Volume 7, Number 26, June 26, 1919 Page: 8
16 p. : ill. ; 31 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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SCOUTING, JUNE 26, 1919
The Boy Scouts Book of Stories
A Review by Daniel Carter Beard
IT HAS BEEN the effort of a number
of the vigorous outdoor men in the
Boy Scout Crusade to inject as much
vitality, red blood and action into the
crusade as is consistent- with the boys'
other pursuits, and it is the aim of all
those governing the Boy Scout program
to give the boys everything normal that
boys desire, having full faith, based on
years of experience, that the boys them-
selves prefer the clean, manly things in
life.
In going over the stories in this Boy
Scouts' book, it is evident that Mr.
Franklin K. Matthews, the editor, has
absorbed the real Boy Scout spirit and is
inspired by the feelings and convictions
of the other leaders, and consequently has
collected a most intensely interesting and
stirring lot of stories, beginning with
"The Great Big Man" by Owen John-
son; a story of real boys who act and
talk like boys.
Then comes "The Twilight Adven-
ture" by Melville Davisson Post; a
thrilling and convincing story of lynch
law. Those of us who grew up in the
South, or the West cannot read this story
without a feeling that this is not fiction
but a real incident. We all of us know
the potential tragedy foreshadowed by
the two men " with their elbows strapped
to their bodies and their mouths gagged
with saddle clothe." And we can pic-
ture in our mind the gray arm of the
beech tree stretching menacingly over the
men's heads.
In this collection of stories, besides the
ones mentioned, there is "Tad Sheldon,
Second Class Scout," by John Fleming
Wilson; a good scout story of the boys
among the life savers on the coast, which
displays the real scout spirit. Conan
Doyle's celebrated " Red-headed League "
is in the procession, also one of O.
Henry's delightful stories. " The Honk-
Honk Breed " by Stewart Edward White
is convincing proof that scouting is an
outdoor proposition.
In fact the name of the authors will
carry conviction to the reader's mind
that this is a book he wants to read.
Norman Duncan, Mark Twain, Booth
Tarkington, and not forgetting a story
by one of the red-blooded men of the
Camp-fire Club of America, Edward
Beecher Bronson, a man whose whole
life was like an old fashioned book of
adventure by Captain Mayne Reed.
Among outdoor men the name of Ed-
ward Beecher Bronson is one with which
to conjure; explorer, Indian fighter,
writer and loyal camp-mate, Bronson has
left friends wherever the old West is
known and talked about.
We have also Hermann Hagedorn, and
our dearly beloved Robert Louis Steven-
son, the quaint and original Joseph C.
Lincoln of Cape Cod fame, Morgan Rob-
ertson, Stephen Chalmers, Thomas W.
Hanshew, A. T. Quiller-Couch, ending
up with the classic Lord Edward Bulwer-
Lytton.
There are over four hundred pages of
good reading and there is something
doing from page 1 to page 424. The
book is stimulating but healthy and diges-
tible food for boys' minds; clean without
being sissy, moral without being molly
coddle.
When I took this book up to read for
review, I had finished a hard day's work,
and was brain-tired and weary, but I
forgot it all as soon as I started to re-
read the stories. My intention was to
skim through the book so as to absorb a
general idea for the review, but the in-
terest was so compelling that it was late
at night when I closed it, and the review
was unwritten.
The Editor has shown rare discrimina-
tion in the selection of the stories; they
are just what boys need. Read around
the camp-fire, the council-fire, the open-
fire at home, the steam-heater, the register
or the kitchen stove, these stories, like
good food well served, are appropriate
for any occasion.
Ninth Law Propaganda
Boy Scouts Have Been Awarded
the Following W. S. S. Honors
Up to June 14, 1919
Achievement Buttons 20,826
Ace Medals 12,710
Bronze Palms 37,781
Silver Palms 2,294
Gold Palms 377
1918 Cards Received 1919
2,081,300 103,060
Value
$40,997,845 $2,025,129
'Bing' Go the 'Whoppers'
A loud wail goes up from the Santa
Fe New Mexican because, as it sadly
suggests, all the things that once made the
great Southwest fearsome and thrilling
are disappearing one by one, and soon the
place will be no more wild and woolly
than Fifth Avenue, New York. The im-
mediate cause of the lament is the an-
nouncement by the University of Arizona,
after long and painiful research, that
there has never been an authentic case of
death resulting from the bite of the Gila
monster. What a shame ! W'e know just
how the New Mexican man feels. Ever
since our early youth when we read and
were horribly fascinated by accounts of
the deadly venom and ferocious ways of
this reptile we had cherished the hope
that some day we might have the pleas-
ure of observing—from a safe distance
—the creature pulling off a few stunts in
its native haunts, particularly that inter-
esting little one of expelling its poison-
ous breath with a vicious hiss and there-
by causing the instant death and destruc-
tion of all plant and animal life within
a wide circumference. But that's all over
now. Trust a scientific shark to take the
thrill out of what has always 'been mys-
terious and_ awe-inspiring until science
got to fooling with it. But there are
other things, also, it appears—many others
—which once helped to add to the wild-
ness and woolliness of the West, but
which now, alas, are no more. The New
Mexican man goes on to speak of them
lugubriously as follows:
A short time ago they found out, o>
purported to find out, that the hydro
phobia skunk's bite is no more dangerous
than that of the common house or
Thomas cat. The 'axalotl, ajalote, waja-
lote, or guajalote, whose deadlines we
once fondly cherished as one of our most
popular and well-known Southwestern
dangers, was eaten up in large numbers
by the fish when they put trout in Stew-
art's lake up in the Pecos country.
Whereas we once proudly told the effete
that the tarantula in this man's pictur-
esque country could jump fifty feet and
bite while he was still jumping, throwing
the victim at once into fatal spasms, we
are assured now that he can only crawl
at a snail's pace and all you get from his
nippers is a severe headache. We knew a
foreman in an Albuquerque print-shop
only three years ago who had a six-inch
centipede ramble all around his anatomy
for half a day, to be safely removed
without difficulty when the victim found
that the occasional itching inside his
trouser leg was due to something more
than a skeeter-bite. The horny toad's
peaceful and affectionate disposition and
lack of offensive potentialities have be-
come so weir known that we can lie about
him no more; the scorpion is becoming a
harmless joke, and just the other day we
saw a youngster hitching that shudder-
ingly horrible, striped insect known as the
child-of-the-earth, reputed to cause sud-
den death and as fatal as an adder, up to
a paper wagon and hauling it docilely
around.
We still have our old friend the rat-
tler, theme of a thousand hair-raising
narratives, whose murderous rattle still
makes both Westerner and Easterner
jump sideways and volplane out of the
way when he rears his ugly head; but who
knows? The Moki handle him with im-
punity and make a necklace out of him,
and one of these days some killjoy scien-
tist will step out and prove that the dia-
mond-back, when you get right down to
facts, is as harmless as a fishworm and
that his reputation for frightfulness is
founded on nothing more substantial
than _ the pink-elephant dreams of a
chronic souse.
It is an iconoclastic age in the South-
west. And we hate to be forced to the
puerile alternative of spinning yarns
about the side-hill hodag, the mazazza,
the ornery-thorny-cuss, the catawampus
and the polymolyrineus. But there is
practically nothing else left to brag about.
-—Literary Digest.
The Department of Herpetology of the
American Museum of Natural History,
New York City, will be glad to assist
Boy Scouts and Soutmasters interested
in Natural History, by supplying identifi-
cations and all the information available
about specimens of lizards, snakes, tur-
tles, _ frogs, toads, and salamanders.
Speciments for identification may be sent
alive in tin cans with holes punched in
the covers for air, addressed to the De-
partment of Herpetology, American Mu-
seum of Natural History, New York
City, and such specimens will be pre-
served by the Museum
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Boy Scouts of America. Scouting, Volume 7, Number 26, June 26, 1919, periodical, June 26, 1919; New York, New York. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth283079/m1/8/: accessed May 4, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Boy Scouts of America National Scouting Museum.