This textbook is a fifth reader designed to help children acquire the art and the habit of reading well. All the lessons in this volume are easily within the comprehension of pupils in the fifth-year grades of the public schools. The reader covers things like historical and biographical stories, selections relating to nature, letters by famous persons, stories and poems, and literature. Writings by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Howitt, Benjamin Franklin, Henry W. Longfellow, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Tennyson are presented.