Wow! Here’s one of the illustrations from the edition I had! Never thought I could see these pictures again, just by asking the search engine.
Don’t you love it when something from your childhood, revisited many years later, turns out to be every bit as wonderful as you remembered it? For me it was The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling.
Pure storytelling by Kipling–almost a lost art, these days.
Tarzan was raised by apes. Mowgli was raised by wolves. They can probably both be thankful they weren’t raised by modern-day parents in America.
This weekend, Easter egg hunts at Orange, Connecticut, and Proctor, Vermont, turned ugly, very ugly, as parents jumped the starting signal and raced onto the fields to scarf up all the eggs ( http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pushy-parents-create-mess-at-easter-egg-hunts/ar-BBqZPIR?ocid=ansmsnnews11 ). The scene in Proctor was a near-riot which had to be broken up by police.
Last year they had an even bigger fiasco in Sacramento, California, as parents trampled and cursed at small children in what was intended to be the world’s biggest Easter egg hunt.
So our culture’s all right, is it? Nothing wrong here?
I can’t even imagine my father or my mother behaving like that–or any other adult I knew in my childhood, either. The whole community would have been appalled, and the offender packed off somewhere where he could never trouble us again.
And let us not forget that the whole affair was blasphemous. Easter is the day we proclaim the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Redeemer of us all.
But then I doubt very, very much that that would ever have occurred to any of these post-Christian parents.