Excerpt from Pageants and Pageantry The following chapters summarize briefly the experience of some years in producing and writing amateur plays and pageants. The teaching experience of the author has shown her that as a means of instruction, of inculcating literary appreciation, and of producing the historic sense, dramatic work has no equal. Far-away incidents become vital experiences, names and facts take on actuality, and that imaginative power that is ever keenest in children needs no urging when "the play's the thing." Nothing sends children so willingly to the library shelves as the desire to know something of the times they are going to portray, of the costumes they are going to wear, and of the manners they shall depict. Nothing will put them into the mediaeval spirit like acting out The Children's Crusade; nothing will make them feel the colonial temper like a play of Puritan times; nor will they forget Regulus or Vespasian, Charlemagne or Caxton, after they have seen them walk the boards of their school hall. Acting teaches more than the fact, trains more than the voice or the bearing, and besides all its intrinsic values, such work brings esprit de corps into the school where it flourishes, - furnishes incentives to good work, and keeps many an idle J-and unambitious child in school when otherwise he would have wandered his discontented way into truancy or the factory. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."