This textbook is a reader intended to develop children's taste for classic, diverse works. In addition to providing a definite and flexible method for teaching beginners to read, effort has been made to include only material that may justly be called classic and that have held up under repeated school use. Care has also been taken to present a variety of appeal through the heroic, the imaginative, the humorous, the ethical and the realistic. Special attention has been given to the biographies of authors in the desire to make them interesting as well as instructive. Lists of books for home reading are included in the "Third," "Fourth" and "Fifth Readers," not only for the direction of the child and the guidance of the teacher, but also to obtain the cooperation of parents in fixing in habit the taste for good literature created by the text books themselves. The notes appended for study have been prepared, not only to explain the text, but to further the child's interest in the author and the selection. At the end of each book will be found suggestions to teachers.