Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read this ebook for free! No credit card needed, absolutely nothing to pay.
Words: 52963 in 32 pages
This is an ebook sharing website. You can read the uploaded ebooks for free here. No credit cards needed, nothing to pay. If you want to own a digital copy of the ebook, or want to read offline with your favorite ebook-reader, then you can choose to buy and download the ebook.
PREFACE It was good advice that Rudyard Kipling gave his "young British soldier" in regard to the latter's rifle:
"She's human as you are--you treat her as sich And she'll fight for the young British soldier."
But we are not concerned with animals now. Kipling's ocean liner has human interest--a soul. I need not tell you that a boat is human. Its every erratic quality of crankiness, its veritable heroism under stress, its temperament makes it very human indeed. That is why a man will often let his boat rot rather than sell it.
This is not true of all inanimate things. It depends. I have never heard of a steam roller or a poison gas bomb being beloved by anybody. I should not care to associate with a hand grenade. It is a matter of taste; I dare say I could learn to love a British tank, but I could never make a friend and confidante of a balloon. An aeroplane might prove a good pal--we shall have to see.
I need not tell you that a camp-fire is human and that trees are human.
The pioneers of old, pressing into the dim wilderness, christened their old flintlocks and talked to them as a man may talk to a man. The woodsman's axe was "deare and greatly beloved," we are told.
The hard-pressed Indian warrior knelt in the forest and besought that life-long comrade, his bow, not to desert or fail him. King Philip kept in his quiver a favorite arrow which he never used because it had earned retirement by saving his own life.
What Paul Revere may have said to his horse in that stirring midnight ride we do not know. But may we not suppose that he urged his trusty steed forward with resolute and inspiring words about the glorious errand they were upon?
Perhaps the lonely ringer of the immortal bell up in the Old South steeple muttered some urgent word of incentive to that iron clanger as it beat against its ringing wall of brass.
You will not like him any the less because of the noise he made in trudging up a hill, or because his mud-guard was broken off, or his tire wounded in the great cause, or his polished headlight knocked into a tin can. You will not ridicule the old splint of a shingle which was bound with such surgical nicety among his rusting spokes. If you do, then you are the kind of a boy who would laugh at a wounded soldier and you had better not read this book.
TOM SLADE
MOTORCYCLE DISPATCH-BEARER
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
(0)More posts by @FreeBooks
