Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

HOWARD PYLE: A CHRONICLE
"My mother was very fond of pictures in books. A number of prints hung on the walls of our house: there were
engravings of Landseer and Holman Hunt's pictures, and
there was a colored engraving of Murldlo's Madonna standing balanced on the crescent moon, and there was pretty
smiling Beatrice Cenci, and several others that were thought
to be good pictures in those days. But we-my mother and
I-liked the pictures in the books the best of all. I may
say to you in confidence that even to this very day I still
like the pictures you find in books better than wall
pictures,.*0
"I can remember many and many an hour in which I lay
stretched out before the fire upon the rug in the snug, warm
little library, whilst the hickory logs snapped and crackled
in the fireplace, and the firelight twinkled on the andirons,
and the snow, maybe, was softly falling outside, covering all
the far-away fields with a blanket of white,--many and many
an hour do I remember lying thus, turning over leaf after
leaf of those English papers [Punch and the Illustrated
London News], or of that dear old volume of The Newcomes
(the one with the fables on the title page), or of The Old
Curiosity Shop where you may see the picture of Master
Humphrey with the dream people flying about his head. So
looking at the pictures, my mother, busy with the work on
her lap, would tell me the story that belonged to each.
"Thus it was that my mother taught me to like books and
pictures, and I cannot remember the time when I did not
like them; so that time, perhaps, was the beginning of that
taste that led me to do the work I am now doing." 1
"~ When I Was a Little Boy," Woman's Home Companion, April, 1912z,
xxxix, p. 5.
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