This textbook provides the foundation for an elementary English course that combines grammar and composition. It is especially useful for ungraded schools. This book is an attempt to bring the subject of language home to children at the age when knowledge is acquired in an objective way, by practice and habit, rather than by the study of rules and definitions. In pursuance of this plan, the traditional presentation of grammar in a bristling array of classifications, nomenclatures, and paradigms has been wholly discarded. The pupil is brought in contact with the living language itself and made to deal with speech, to turn it over in a variety of ways, to handle sentences; so that the pupil is not kept back from the exercise -- so profitable and interesting -- of using language till the pupil has mastered the anatomy of the grammarian.