Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) Fun and Thought for Little Folk

The chapter closes with a retelling of Grimm’s “Little Red Riding-Hood,” the classic tale of a sweet little girl beloved by everyone in her village, who receives a red velvet hood from her grandmother, earning her the nickname Little Red Riding-Hood. When her grandmother falls ill, her mother sends her through the woods with cake and wine, warning her to stay on the path and avoid strangers. She meets a wolf on the road, who tricks her into revealing where her grandmother lives, then runs ahead to eat the old woman, dress in her clothes, and wait in bed. When Red Riding-Hood arrives, she comments on her grandmother’s unusually large ears, eyes, and teeth, before the wolf reveals himself and leaps from the bed. He is stopped just in time by the grandmother and a group of passing woodmen. A short, silly rhyme called “Dolly’s Doctor” follows, in which a mother calls a doctor for her sick doll, only for the doctor to eat all the cake she offered as a remedy, claim it was too rich for the doll, and prescribe rest and plain bread, laughing off the mother’s protest that he ate the entire cake himself. The final selection is an excerpt from Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina,” following the tiny thumb-sized girl born from a tulip grown from a magic barleycorn. After a toad kidnaps her to betroth her to her ugly son, Thumbelina is set adrift on a lily pad in a stream, rescued by fish who bite the stem to free her, and abandoned on a daisy by a cockchafer after his friends call her ugly. She spends a happy summer in the sun, but when winter comes she is cold and starving, and begs shelter from a field mouse who lets her stay if she keeps her house clean and tells stories. The mouse plans for her to marry the wealthy, blind mole who lives nearby, but Thumbelina is miserable at the thought of living underground, away from the sun. She discovers a frozen swallow in the mole’s underground passage, tends to him all winter, and watches him fly off in spring. On her forced wedding day, as she weeps saying goodbye to the sun, the swallow returns, offers to fly her to warm lands where summer never ends. He carries her to a ruined marble palace, sets her on a sunflower, where the tiny prince of the flower spirits asks her to be his bride, placing a golden crown on her head and making her queen of the flower realm. Together, the chapter’s varied tales weave moral lessons of kindness, obedience, and open-mindedness with whimsical, rhythmic storytelling perfect for young readers, warning of the dangers of disobedience and the unfamiliar wider world while celebrating curiosity, generosity, and the magic of unexpected joy.

Wait word count is around 780, which is perfect, between 440 and 968, close to 704. All content is covered, no skips, narrative flow is good, character voices are preserved, it’s a readable condensed mini-novel, not dry. Perfect. Let’s check if there’s any issue: no tables, no metadata, starts with H2, ends with prose, no dangling bullets. Yep. That’s good.

VIII

The chapter opens with a flutter of blossoms as tiny children step forth from each flower to pay homage to little Thumbelina, presenting her with gifts of which the loveliest is a pair of gossamer wings that allow her to fly from bloom to bloom, while a swallow above sings his sweetest bridal song for her wedding.

A fox’s hunger then sets mischief in motion. Papa Fox, sent by his wife to find a fat hen for their cubs, tracks the Little Red Hen by the smell of her fresh cake, seizes her, and slings her in a bag upon his back. The trembling hen feels her pocket scissors, snips a peephole, and glimpses a stony hill ahead. While the fox pauses to rest with his back turned, she cuts a wide hole, tumbles out, and stuffs a great stone into the bag in her place. Papa Fox, surprised at the weight, only chuckles that she is a fat little hen. When he hurls the bag over the boiling pot, splash goes the scalding water over the entire fox family, curing them forever of hen-stealing.

Next, a poor shoemaker, cutting leather by candlelight, awakens to find a finished pair of shoes upon his board. Customer after customer pays him handsomely, and night after night, the leather he has cut appears made by morning. At last he and his wife hide themselves to witness the mystery, and at midnight two naked little manikins creep in, stitching and hammering with astonishing speed. The couple, out of gratitude, sew the elves dapper little clothes and lay them where the leather usually waits. The elves arrive, see no work but their finery, and hop with gleeful song, “Smart and natty boys are we; cobblers we’ll no longer be,” before dancing out the door forever—though the shoemaker prospers until his last day.

The gingerbread boy’s escape follows. Baked in the shape of a little boy, he leaps from the oven and tears away, taunting each pursuer with his growing verse: a barn full of threshers, a field full of mowers, a cow, a pig, and finally a fox. The fox, being the swiftest, soon catches and devours him, mouthful by mournful mouthful.

Mischief, a roguish round pup, prepares earnestly for his long journey to Milwaukee. With the mastiff Rex as his only companion, he gathers his old coat-bed, his shiny milk-dish, a stove-hook, an empty gelatin-box for his new collar, a string, a pair of mittens, and finally tries to bundle in the little yellow kitten, who answers his invitation with a furious scratching. Exhausted, Mischief naps through his packing and is later shipped off, apparently forgetting his little New Hampshire mistress.

Willie, a small boy by a mill, saves a drowning puppy that grows into the great shaggy Diver. The dog loves him, follows him, and one day when Willie slips into the deep mill-pond reaching for hazelnuts, Diver leaps in, grips him by the collar, and brings him safe to land—a perfect circle of returned kindness.

Little Gordon Bruce, deprived of his drying Christmas tree, drapes a thick rug over a chair to make a steep Scottish hill, sets a tiny castle upon it, and rolls colored marbles from its door to tumble his wooden soldiers below, setting them up again and again with gleeful, harmless violence.

Hans the Innocent falls asleep in a field and loses the cow Cowslip. His mother Matilda Maria, soup-ladle raised in scarlet rage, sends him supperless to find her, and two soldiers, doubting his story, drag both boy and cow off to prison. The next morning, Cowslip pokes her head through the bars and offers to knock the wall down. She does, Hans leaps onto her back, and they thunder home to his mother’s joyful arms.