The Load of Chips, and Other Stories

A boy carries home a load of chips from the timber-yard, and what he does with them turns a poor family's winter. Three more tales follow: a farm child who takes the squirrels' part when her father talks of shooting them, a factory boy keeping a household alive on his wages, and the children of the rag-and-coal fields who are hauled out of the dirt by a school and a prayer. Madeline Leslie was the pen name of Harriette Newell Woods Baker, a Massachusetts minister's daughter who wrote some two hundred books for the young and meant every one of them to teach. Fifty-nine plates, among them work by Winslow Homer, George Inness and Albert Bierstadt, range from 1718 to 1907 and dwell on hearth, harvest and the labour of children.