BLACKIE'S GRADED READERS.

EDITED BY MAURICE PATERSON, B.A., ETC.,
Rector of Moray House Training College, Edinburgh.

LONDON:
BLACKIE & SON, 49 & 50 OLD BAILEY, E.C.

GLASGOW, EDINBURGH, AND DUBLIN.

3937. f. 59.

BODLEIAN LIBRARY

6 OCT85

OXFORD

1

PREFACE.

THE FIFTH READER is adapted either to the Fifth or the Sixth
Standard of the Code. The mechanical difficulties of Reading have
by this time been surmounted, so that the pupils are in a position
to overtake lessons that are somewhat longer and more difficult.
The communication of instruction also through what is read may
now be kept more directly in view. It is confidently hoped that
the variety of the subjects, the absence, as far as possible, of scientific
terms, as well as the attractive character of the lessons themselves,
will serve to maintain the pupils' interest throughout the book.
Examination questions and brief notes have been added to most of

the lessons.

A series of Etymological Lessons on a new plan is appended.
While enabling the pupil better to understand and more accurately
to use his own language, these lessons, if judiciously used, will form
an interesting and profitable intellectual exercise.

FIFTH READER.

ENGLAND TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.1

1. Could the England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes, we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not recognise his own fields. The inhabitant of the town would not recognise his own street. Everything has been changed, but the great features of nature, and a few massive and durable works of art.

2. We might find out Snowdon and Windermere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head. We might find out here and there a Norman minster, or a castle which witnessed the wars of the Roses. But, with such rare exceptions, everything would be strange to us.

3. Many thousands of square miles which are now rich corn land and meadow, intersected by green hedge-rows and dotted with villages and pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks.

4. We should see straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present suburb on the south

1 Adapted from Macaulay's History of England, by permission of Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.