A New Story Book for Children Author:Fanny Fern General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1864 Original Publisher: Mason Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select fr... more »om more than a million books for free. Excerpt: OLD HICKORY. MANY a time, I dare say, you have sat on your bench at school, with your cotton handkerchief spread over your knee, looking at the stern face of this famous man upon it; every bristling hair upon his head seeming to say for itself, In the name of the commonwealth, stand and deliver ! Tou have thought, perhaps, that a man with such a sharp eye and granite face as that, must be a very terrible person, whose heart was quite left out when he was made, and whom little children had better run away from. It is just because this was not true, that I first believed in General Jackson. A brave man is never a mean one; and it is mean to despise or bully children and women. I place children first, because every woman who has ever had one, does so. But to my story. We, who have lived so peacefully and quietly in the land for which our brave ancestors fought, do not think as often as we ought of the sufferings and trials through which they purchased it for us. Until lately, our houses were not burned down over our heads, or ransacked and robbed, nor our mothers and sisters insulted before our eyes, nor our fathers and brothers dragged off as prisoners of war, and kicked and cuffed for sport by the enemy. -All this, Andrew Jackson's boyish eyes saw. Do you wonder at the fire in them ? One of his earliest recollections was of the meeting house in his native place turned into a hospital for his wounded, maimed, dying, brave countrymen ; and his own widowed mother, leading him there by the hand to nurse them, and dress their wounds, and comfort them, as only a woman with a stro...« less