'The Flight of Pony Baker' will at once commend itself to boys and their elders because it is the work of William Dean Howells. Mr. Howells knows the modern American boy so thoroughly, his ambitions and traits, his temptations and joys, that one is predisposed to like Pony Baker. He lived in a small country town and was petted by his mother much to his disgust, and sternly suppressed by his father; and of course, being a boy, he planned to run away to the Indians, and, later, he made up his mind to join a circus—what boy has not? But through all these phases of his young life our author brings Pony Baker, showing his old-time charm of narration. The days are those before the war; the scene is in a little Ohio river town; and the characters are real boys and real girls. Pony Baker decides upon flight from his home, and the most admirable humor is shown in narrating his various attempts at absconding, not one of which becomes known to his unsuspecting parents until the book's close; and even this attempt is not carried very far.
