Audiobook · read by volunteers
Tale of Timothy Turtle
Arthur Scott Bailey (1877–1949)
Read by Robin Cotter · 8 chapters · 1 h 27
About the book
Timothy Turtle is an old fellow who likes to be left alone. He lives beside Black Creek, he moves slowly, he grumbles often and he trusts no one who comes too near. But life on a creek bank is full of visitors: Fatty Coon, Mr. Crow, Brownie Beaver, Peter Mink, Ferdinand Frog and even Johnnie Green, the farmer's boy. Each meeting leads to a small adventure, a mishap or a lesson, all told in short, simple sentences. This is one of Arthur Scott Bailey's Sleepy-Time Tales, written to be read aloud to young children at the end of the day. Robin Cotter reads all eight chapters, in about an hour and a half, and the creek is a calm place to be. Soft-spoken and amusing, it is meant for drifting off to sleep.
Introduction
Arthur Scott Bailey was born in 1877 and died in 1949. He was an American author who wrote a long series of animal stories for small children, known as the Sleepy-Time Tales. The Tale of Timothy Turtle was published in 1919. Like the other books in the series, it is short, gentle and built around a single character whose temperament sets the plot in motion, so that a grumpy turtle makes very different decisions from a frisky squirrel.
The tales were written in the early twentieth century, when stories about animals in rural settings were popular with young readers, and Bailey belongs to the same tradition as Thornton W. Burgess and Beatrix Potter. His animals talk and think like people, but they keep many of their natural habits. The language is easy to follow, with plenty of repetition, and the plots are gentle, so the stories are well suited to bedtime.
This LibriVox recording lasts about an hour and a half and is divided into 8 sections, covering the book's chapters in groups. It is read by one volunteer, Robin Cotter. It is a pleasant choice for parents and grandparents, and for anyone who likes quiet stories from the riverbank.
Because the chapters are short and the vocabulary is gentle, the book is easy to follow in small portions. Children enjoy meeting the same creek-side characters in different situations, and adults may enjoy the quiet humour that Bailey allows himself between the lines.
Public domain
Arthur Scott Bailey died in 1949: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text