When-I-was-a-boy I was given a magic book. It was written by a man who wrote “when I was a boy” with hyphens between the words in order, as it didn’t take me long to figure out, to poke gentle fun at the way that old folks like him talked to children. Yet I never felt that he was talking down to me. On the contrary, his occasional reminiscences of a happy and unremarkable childhood only made the magic comfortable when it might have been scary. For it was the story of the whole world from the time when, he told me, the earth was thrown out of the sun like a spark from a log fire until the Korean War, which, I was vaguely aware, had been going on during my lifetime.
History was a tale of almost uniformly disastrous wars between closed societies.
The magic book was called A Child’s History of the Worldand the magician’s name was V. M. Hillyer, who, the title page informed me, was the late Head Master of the Calvert School in Baltimore. I remember hoping that, in this case, “late” did not mean dead, though I feared it did because the book had been revised and updated by another man, Edward G. Huey, also of the Calvert School. I was not aware of any difference in style between these two hands. The book, like history itself, appeared to me to be a seamless web into which all the strands