Tom Slade on the River

A scout troop takes to the river for the summer, and Tom Slade — a slum boy who joined for the uniform — turns out to be the one who can be relied on. Percy Keese Fitzhugh wrote the official Boy Scout fiction for twenty years and made Tom the least priggish hero the movement produced. The boat work is real and the reform of the hero happened two books earlier, which helps. Fifty-one plates of campfire, dory and riverbank painting by Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson carry the scout summer in pictures.