The Sandman

Twenty-one stories of the everyday doings of Little John around the farm: fetching water, grinding corn, making cider, growing wheat, boiling maple syrup, and so on. Numerous black and white illustrations enliven the text. First volume in a series of a stories created by a father to induce a certain little boy to go to sleep. For nearly three years his one listener heard them repeated many times, and his interest never flagged. As the farm stories slowly grew in number, eventually to fill two volumes, they entirely displaced the other stories, and that farm became as real in the mind of his listener as it was in fact when little John was driving the cows or planting the corn in the early part of the nineteenth century. Later came two more volumes about a ship and its voyages at sea, and a final volume on house building. Ideal for ages 5 to 7.