Fifty short tales every English-speaking child once knew: Damocles and the sword, Regulus, Alfred and the cakes, William Tell, the sword of Bruce, Grace Darling. Baldwin gathered them for American schools and told each in two pages, without pointing the moral more than once. Whether the stories are true is a question he answers honestly in the preface, and then tells them anyway. Thirty-nine plates after Piranesi, McTaggart and others carry the sweep of the old world these tales belong to, from Roman prisons to the Northumberland coast.
