"Who selected the books?" I asked.

"Nobody exactly selected them," the librarian said. "Every one around here gave a few from their collections, so's we could have a near-to library—principally on account of the children. I live most convenient to every one hereabouts; so I had shelves put up in my lean-to for them."

News travels very rapidly indeed in the country. My boy friend told some of the other children that I was reading the oldest books in the library. "She takes them out by the armfuls," I overheard him remark.

No doubt he made more comments that I did not overhear; for one morning a small girl called to see me, and, after a few preliminaries, said, "If you are through with 'The Fairchild Family,' may I have it? You like it awfully much, don't you?"

Not only in the secular teaching of their children do thoughtful country parents, in common with careful fathers and mothers living elsewhere, try to obtain the best means and to use them to the best ends; in the religious instruction of their children they make a similar attempt. They are not content to let their children learn entirely at home, to depend solely upon parental guidance. The church, and even the Sunday school, are integral parts in the up-bringing of the most happily situated country children. The little white meeting-houses in the small rural villages are familiar places to the country child—joyously familiar places, at that. The only weekly outing that falls to the lot of the younger children of country parents is the Sunday trip to church and Sunday school.

What do they get from it? Undoubtedly, very much what city children receive from the church and the Sunday school—in quantity and in quality. There is a constant pleasure from the singing; an occasional glimmer of illumination from the sermon; and an unfailing delight from the Bible stories. We can be reasonably sure that all children get thus much from the habitual church and Sunday-school attendance. Some, irrespective of city or country environment, glean more.

A small country boy of my acquaintance brought from Sunday school one of the most unique versions of a Scriptural passage with which I have ever met. "Did you go to church this morning?" I inquired of him, one Sunday afternoon, when, catching a glimpse of me under the trees near his home, he came, as he explained, to "pass the time of day" with me.

"Yes," he answered; "and I went to Sunday school, too."

"And what was your lesson about?" I asked.

"Oh, about the roses—"

"Roses?" I interrupted, in surprise.

"Yes," the little boy went on; "the roses—you know—in the gardens."

"I don't remember any Sunday-school lesson about them," I said.

"But there is one; we had it to-day. The roses, they made the children have good manners. Then, one day, the children were greedy; and their manners were bad. Don't you know about it?" he added anxiously.

He was but five years old. I told him about Moses; I explained painstakingly just who the Children of Israel were; and I did my best to point out clearly the difference between manna and manners. He listened with seeming understanding; but the next day, coming upon me as I was fastening a "crimson rambler" to its trellis, he inquired solemnly, "Can the roses make children have good manners, yet?"

Country children are taught, even as sedulously as city children, the importance of good manners! On the farm, as elsewhere, the small left hand is seized in time by a mother or an aunt with the well-worn words, "Shake hands with the right hand, dear." "If you please," as promptly does an elder sister supplement the little child's "Yes," on the occasion of an offer of candy from a grown-up friend. The proportion of small boys who make their bows and of little girls who drop their courtesies is much the same in the country as it is in the city.



In the matter of clothes, too, the country mother, like any other mother in America, wishes her children to be becomingly attired, in full accord with such of the prevailing fashions as seem to her most suitable. In company with the greater portion of American mothers, she devotes considerable time and strength and money to the wardrobes of her boys and girls. The result is that country children are dressed strikingly like city children. Their "everyday" garments are scarcely distinguishable from the "play clothes" of city children; their "Sunday" clothes are very similar to the "best" habiliments of the boys and girls who do not live in the country.

We have all read, in the books of our grandmothers' childhood, of the children who, on the eve of going to visit their city cousins, were much exercised concerning their wearing apparel. "Would the pink frock, with the green sash, be just what was being worn to parties in the city?" the little girl of such story-books fearfully wondered. "Will boys of my age be wearing short trousers still?" the small boy dubiously queried. Invariably it transpired that pink frocks and green sashes, if in fashion at all, were never seen at parties; and that long trousers were absolutely essential, from the point of view of custom, for boys of our hero's age. Many woes were attendant upon the discovery that these half-suspected sumptuary laws were certain facts.

No present-day country boy and girl, coming from the average home to the house of city cousins, would need to feel any such qualms. Should they, five minutes' inspection of the garments of those city cousins would relieve their latent questionings. They would see that, to the casual eye, they and their cousins were dressed in the same type of raiment.

How could they fail to be? A large crop of "fashion magazines" flourishes in America. The rural free delivery brings them to the very doors of the farmhouse. By the use of mail orders the mother on the farm can obtain whatever materials the particular "fashion magazine" to which she is a subscriber advises, together with paper patterns from which she can cut anything, from "jumpers" to a "coat for gala occasions."

The approved clothes of all American children in our time are so exceedingly simple in design that any woman who can sew at all can construct them; and, in the main, the materials of which they are made are so inexpensive that even the farmer whose income is moderate in size can afford to supply them. A clergyman who had worked both in city and in country parishes once told me that he attributed the marked increase in ease and grace of manner—and, consequently, in "sociability"—among country people to-day, as compared with country people of his boyhood, very largely to the invention of paper patterns.

"Rural folk dressed in a way peculiar to themselves then," he said; "now they dress like the rest of the world. It is curious," he went on, reflectively, "but human beings, as a whole, seem unable not to be awkward in their behavior if their costumes can possibly be differentiated otherwise than by size!"

It is another queer fact that normal persons would seem to require "best" clothes. They share the spirit of Jess, in "A Window in Thrums." "But you could never wear yours, though ye had ane," said Hendry to her about the "cloak with beads"; "ye would juist hae to lock it awa in the drawers." "Aye," Jess retorted, "but I would aye ken it was there."

I have an acquaintance who is not normal in this matter. She scorns "finery," whether for use or for "locking awa." One summer she and I spent a fortnight together on a Connecticut farm. During the week the farmer and his wife, as well as their two little children, a girl and a boy, wore garments of dark-colored denim very plainly made. The children were barefooted.

"These people have sense," my acquaintance observed to me on the first day of our sojourn; "they dress in harmony with their environment."

I was silent, realizing that, if Sunday were a fine day, she might feel compelled to modify her approbation. On Saturday night the farmer asked if we should care to accompany the family to church the next morning. Both of us accepted the invitation.

Sunday morning, as I had foreseen, when the family assembled to take its places in the "three-seater," the father was in "blacks," with a "boiled" shirt; the mother, a pretty dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman, a pleasant picture in the most every-day of garments, was a charming sight, in a rose-tinted wash silk and a Panama hat trimmed with black velvet. As for the boy and the girl, they were arrayed in spotless white, from their straw hats even to their canvas shoes. The hands of the farmer and his son were uncovered; but the mother and her little daughter wore white lisle gloves. They also carried parasols—the mother's of the shade of her dress, the girl's pale blue. No family in America could possibly have looked more "blithe and bonny" than did that one in "Sunday" clothes, ready for church.

The face of my acquaintance was a study.

In it were mingled surprise and disapproval. Both these elements became more pronounced when we were fairly in the meeting-house. All the men, women, and children there assembled were also in "Sunday" clothes.

My acquaintance has the instinct of the reformer. Hardly were we settled in the "three-seater," preparatory to returning home after the service, when she began. "Do you make your own clothes?" she inquired of the farmer's wife.

"Yes," was the reply; "and the children's, too."

"Isn't there a great deal of work involved in the care of such garments as you are all wearing to-day?" she further pursued.

"I suppose there is the usual amount," the other woman said, dryly.

"Then, why do you do it—living in the country, as you do?"

"There is no reason why people shouldn't dress nicely, no matter where they happen to live," was the answer. "During the week we can't; but on Sunday we can, and do, and ought—out of respect to the day," she quaintly added.



The city is not a mere name to American country children. Increased train facilities, the improvement in the character of country roads brought about by the advent of the automobile, and the extension of the trolley system have done much to mitigate the isolation of rural communities. The farmer and his wife can avail themselves of the advantages to be found in periodical trips to the nearest city. Like other American parents, they invite their children to share their interests. The boys and girls are included in the jauntings to the city.

I once said to a little girl whom I met on a farm in Massachusetts: "You must come soon and stay with me in the city from Saturday until Monday. We will go to the Art Museum and look at the pictures."

"Oh," she cried, joyously, "I'd love to! Every time we go to town, and there is a chance, mother and I go to the Museum; we both like the pictures so much."

This little girl, when she was older, desired to become a kindergartner. There was a training-school in the near-by city. She could not afford to go to and fro on the train, but there was a trolley. The journey on the trolley occupied three hours, but the girl took it twice daily for two years.

"Doesn't it tire you?" I asked her.

"Oh, somewhat," she admitted; "but I was already used to it. We usually traveled to town on it when I was small."

"Countrified" is not the word to apply to American farmers and their families. One might as aptly employ it when describing the people of England who live on their "landed estates." Ignorance and dullness and awkwardness we shall not often find among country children. The boys and girls on the farms are as well informed, as mentally alert, and as attractive as children in any other good homes in America.

We all know Mr. James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Little Cousin Jasper." The country boy in it, we recall, concluded his reflections upon the happier fortune of the boy from the "city" of Rensselaer with these words:

"Wishst our town ain't like it is!— Wishst it's ist as big as his! Wishst 'at his folks they'd move here, An' we'd move to Rensselaer!"

Only last summer I repeated this poem to a little girl whose home was a farm not far from a house at which I was stopping.

"But," she said, in a puzzled tone of voice, "no place is as big as the country! Look!" she exclaimed, pointing to the distant horizon; "it's so big it touches the edge of the sky! No city is that big, is it?"



IV



THE CHILD IN SCHOOL

An elderly woman was talking to me not long ago about her childhood.

"No, my dear, I did not have a governess," she said, in answer to my questionings. "Neither did I attend the public schools, though I lived in the city. I went to a private school. The pupils in it were the girls of the little social circle to which my parents belonged. There were perhaps twenty of us in all. And there were three teachers; one for the 'first class,' one for the 'second class,' and a French-German-music- and-drawing-teacher-in-one for both classes."

"And what did you study?" I asked.

"Besides French, German, music, and drawing?" my elderly friend mused. "Well, we had the three R's; and history, English and American, and geography, and deportment. I think that was all."

"And you liked it?" I ventured.

"Yes, my dear, I did," replied my friend, "though I used to pretend that I didn't. I sometimes even 'played sick' in order to be allowed to stay home from school. Children then, as now, thought they ought to 'hate to go to school.' I believe most of them did, too. I happened to be a 'smart' child; so I liked school. I suppose 'smart' children still do."

A "smart" child! In my mind's eye I can see my elderly friend as one, sitting at the "head" of her class, on a long, narrow bench, her eyes shining with a pleased consciousness of "knowing" the lesson, her cheeks rosy with expectation of the triumph sure to follow her "saying" of it, her lips parted in an eagerness to begin. Can we not all see her, that "smart" child of two generations ago?

As for her lesson, can we not hear it with our mind's ear? In arithmetic, it was the multiplication table; in English history, the names of the sovereigns and the dates of their reigns; in geography, the capitals of the world; in deportment—ah, in deportment, a finer lesson than any of our schools teach now! These were the lessons. Indeed, my elderly friend has told me as much. "And not easy lessons, either, my dear, nor easily learned, as the lessons of schoolchildren seem to be to-day. We had no kindergartens; the idea that lessons were play had not come in; to us lessons were work, and hard work."

My friend gave a little sigh and shook her head ever so slightly as she concluded. It was plain that she deprecated modern educational methods. "Schools have changed," she added.

And has not the attitude of children toward going to school changed even more? Do many of them "hate to go"? Do any of them at all think they "ought to hate to go"? Is a single one "smart" in the old-time sense of the word?

A winter or two ago I was recovering from an illness in a house which, by great good fortune, chanced to be situated on a suburban street corner, not only near a large public school, but directly on the main route of the children going to and from it. My chief pleasure during that shut-in winter was watching those children. Four times a day—at half-past eight, at half-past twelve, at half-past one, and at half-past three—I would take the window to see them going by. They were of many ages and sizes; from the kindergarten babies to the boys and girls of the ninth grade. None of them could possibly have been described as "creeping like snail unwillingly to school." As a usual thing, they came racing pell-mell down the three streets that converged at my corner; after school they as tumultuously went racing up, homeward. I never needed to consult the clock in order not to miss seeing the children. When I heard from outside distant sounds of laughing and shouting, I knew that a school session had just ended—or was about to begin. Which, I could only tell by noting the time. The same joyous turmoil heralded the one as celebrated the other. Clearly, these children, at least, did not "hate to go to school"!

One of them, a little boy of nine, a friend and near neighbor of mine, liked it so well that enforced absence from it constituted a punishment for a major transgression. "Isn't your boy well?" I inquired of his mother when she came to call one evening. "A playmate of his who was here this afternoon told me that he had not been in school to-day."

"Oh, yes, he is perfectly well!" my friend exclaimed. "But he is being disciplined—"

"Disciplined?" I said. "Has he been so insubordinate as that in school?"

"Not in school," the boy's mother said; "at home." Then, seeing my bewilderment, she elucidated. "When he is very naughty at home, I keep him out of school. It punishes him more than anything else, because he loves to go to school."

Another aspect of the subject presented itself to my mind. "I should think he would fall behind in his studies," I commented.

"Oh, no," she replied; "he doesn't. Children don't fall behind in their studies in these days," she added. "They don't get a chance. Every single lesson they miss their teachers require them to 'make up.' When my boy is absent for a day, or even for only half a day, his teacher sees that he 'makes up' the lessons lost before the end of the week. When I was a child, and happened to be absent, no teacher troubled about my lost lessons! I did all the troubling! I laboriously 'made them up'; the thought of examination days coming along spurred me on."

Those examination days! How amazed, almost amused, our child friends are when we, of whose school-days they were such large and impressive milestones, describe them! A short time ago I was visiting an old schoolmate of mine. "Tell me what school was like when you and mother went," her little girl of ten besought me.

So I told her. I dwelt upon those aspects of it differing most from school as she knows it—the "Scholarship Medal," the "Prize for Bible History," and the other awards, the bestowal of which made "Commencement Morning" of each year a festival unequaled, to the pupils of "our" school, by any university commencement in the land, however many and brilliant the number of its recipients of "honorary degrees." I touched upon the ease with which even the least remarkable pupil in that school could repeat the Declaration of Independence and recount the "causes" of the French Revolution. Finally, I mentioned our examination days—six in January, six more in June.

"What did you do on them?" inquired the little girl.

"Will you listen to that?" demanded her mother. "Ten years old—and she asks what we did on examination days! This is what it means to belong to the rising generation—not to know, at ten, anything about examination days!"

"What did you do on them?" the little girl persisted.

"We had examinations," I explained. "All our books were taken away, and we were given paper and pen and ink—"

"And three hours for each examination," my friend broke in. "We had one in the morning and another in the afternoon."

"Yes," I went on. "One morning we would have a grammar examination. Twenty questions would be written on the blackboard by our teacher, and we would write the answers—in three hours. On another morning, or on the afternoon of that same day, we might have an arithmetic examination. There would be twenty questions, and three hours to answer them in, just the same."

"Do you understand, dear?" said the little girl's mother. "Well, well," she went on, turning to me before the child could reply, "how this talk brings examination days back to my remembrance! What excitement there was! And how we worked getting ready for them! I really think it was a matter of pride with us to be so tired after our last examination of the week that we had to go to bed and dine on milk toast and a soft-boiled egg!"

The little girl was looking at us with round eyes.

"Does it all sound very queer?" I asked.

"The going to bed does," she made reply; "and the milk toast and the egg for dinner, and the working hard. The examinations sound something like the tests we have, They are questions to write answers to, but we don't think much about them. I don't believe any of the girls or boys go to bed afterwards, or have milk toast and eggs for dinner—on purpose because they have had a test!"

She was manifestly puzzled. "Perhaps it is because we have tests about every two weeks, and not just in January and June," she suggested.

She did not seem disposed to investigate further the subject of her mother's and my school-days. In a few moments she ran off to her play.

When she was quite out of hearing her mother burst into a hearty laugh. "Poor child!" she exclaimed. "She thinks we and our school were very curious. I wonder why," she continued more seriously, "we did take examinations, and lessons, too, so weightily. Children don't in these days. The school-days of the week are so full of holiday spirit for them that, actually, Saturday is not much of gala day. Think of what Saturday was to us! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday was Saturday, to us! Do you remember the things we did? You wrote poems and I painted pictures, and we read stories, and 'acted' them. Then, we had our gardens in the spring, and our experiments in cake-baking in the winter. My girls do none of these things on Saturday. The day is not to them what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."



I had often wondered; but these reflections of my old schoolmate gave me an inkling of what the main difference is. To us, school had been a place in which we learned lessons from books—books of arithmetic, books of grammar, or other purely academic books. For five days of the week our childish minds were held to our lessons; and our lessons, without exception, dealt with technicalities—parts of speech, laws of mathematics, facts of history, definitions of the terms of geography. Small marvel that Saturday was a gala day to us. It was the one "week day" when we might be unacademic!

But children of the present time have no such need of Saturday. They write poems, and paint pictures, and read stories, and "act" them, and plant gardens, and even bake cake, as regular parts of their school routine. The schools are no longer solely, or even predominantly, academic. As for technicalities, where are they in the schools of to- day? As far in the background as the teachers can keep them. Children do not study grammar now; they are given "language work." It entails none of the memorizing of "rules," "exceptions," and "cautions" that the former study of grammar required. History would seem to be learned without that sometime laying hold of "dates." Geography has ceased to be a matter of the "bounding" of states and the learning of the capitals of the various countries; it has become the "story of the earth." And arithmetic—it is "number work" now, and is all but taught without the multiplication tables. How could Saturday be to the children of to-day what it was to the children of yesterday?

My old schoolmate's little girl had spoken of "tests." In my school-days we called such minor weekly or fortnightly matters as these, "reviews." We regarded them quite as lightly as my small friend looked upon her "tests." Examinations—they were different, indeed. Twice a year we were expected to stretch our short memories until they neatly covered a series of examination papers, each composed of twenty questions, relating to fully sixteen weeks' accumulation of accurate data on the several subjects—fortunately few—we had so academically been studying. It is little wonder that children of the present day are not called upon to "take" such examinations; not only the manner of their teaching, but the great quantity of subjects taught, make "tests" of frequent occurrence the only practicable examinations.

"Children of the present time learn about so many things!" sighed a middle-aged friend of mine after a visit to the school which her small granddaughter attended. "What an array of subjects are brought to their notice, from love of country to domestic science! How do their young minds hold it?"

I am rather inclined to think that their young minds hold it very much as young minds of one, two, or three generations ago held it. After all, what subjects are brought to the notice of present-day children that were not called to the attention of children of former times? The difference would seem to be, not that the children of to-day learn about more things than did the children of yesterday, but that they learn about more things in school. Love of country—were we not all taught that by our fathers as early and as well as the children are taught it to-day by their teachers? And domestic science—did not mothers teach that, not only to their girls, but to their boys also, with a degree of thoroughness not surpassed even by that of the best of modern domestic science teachers? The subjects to be brought to the notice of children appear to be so fixed; the things to be learned by them seem to be so slightly alterable! It is only the place of instruction that has shifted. Such a quantity of things once taught entirely at home are now taught partly at school.

It is the fashion, I know, to deplore this. "How dreadful it is," we hear many a person exclaim, "that things that used to be told a child alone at its mother's knee are now told whole roomfuls of children together in school!"

Certainly it would be "dreadful" should the fact that children are taught anything in school become a reason to parents for ceasing to teach them that same thing at home. So long as this does not happen, ought we not to rejoice that children are given the opportunity of hearing in company from their teachers what they have already heard separately from their fathers and mothers? A boy or a girl who has heard from a father or a mother, in intimate personal talk, of the beauty of truth, the beauty of purity, the beauty of kindness, is fortified in an endeavor to hold fast to these things by hearing a teacher speak of them in a public, impersonal way.

Indeed, is not this unity between the home and the school the great and unique fact in the education of the children of the present time? They are taught at home, as children always have been, and doubtless always will be, an "array of subjects"; and they are taught at school, as children perhaps never before were, other aspects of very nearly all the matters touched upon in that "array." My old schoolmate said that Saturday had lost the glory it wore in her school-days and mine; but it seems to me that what has actually occurred is that the five school-days of the week have taken on the same glory. The joys we had only on Saturday children have now on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!

It is inevitable, I suppose, that they should handle our old delights with rather a professional grasp. One day recently a little girl, a new acquaintance, came to see me. I brought out various toys, left over from my childhood, for her amusement—a doll, with the trunk that still contained her wardrobe; an autograph album, with "verses" and sketches in it; and a "joining map," such as the brother of Rosamond of the Purple Jar owned.



My small caller occupied herself with these for a flattering length of time, then she said: "You played with these—what else did you play with?"

"I made paper-boats," I replied; "and sailed them. I will show you how," I added.

She watched me with interest while I folded and refolded a sheet of writing-paper until it became a boat.

"There!" I said, handing it to her.

"Have you any more, paper you can spare?" she questioned.

"Of course," I said. "Should you like me to make you more boats?"

"I'll make some things for you" she remarked, "if you will let me have the paper."

I offered her the freedom of the writing-paper drawer; and, while I looked on, she folded and refolded with a practiced hand, until the table beside us was covered, not only with boats compared with which mine was as a dory to an ocean liner, but also with a score of other pretty and somewhat intricate paper toys.

"Who taught you to make all these lovely things?" I asked.

"My teacher," answered the small girl. "We all do it, in my room at school, every Friday."

They do so many things! Their grown-up friends are hard put to it to find anything novel to do with, or for, them. Not long ago a little boy friend of mine was ill with scarlet fever. His "case" was so light that the main problem attached to it was that of providing occupation for the child during the six weeks of quarantine in one room. Remembering the pleasure I had taken as a child in planting seeds on cotton in a glass of water and watching them grow at a rate almost equal to that of Jack's beanstalk, I made a similar "little garden" and sent it to the small boy.

"It was lots of fun, having it," he said, when, quite well, he came to see me. "It grew so fast—faster than the others."

"What others?" I queried.

"At school," he explained. "We have them at school; and they grow fast, but the one you gave me grew faster. Was that because it was in a little glass instead of a big bowl?"

I could not tell him. We had not had them at school in my school-days in a big bowl. They had been out-of-school incidents, cultivated only in little glasses.

They have so many things at school, the children of to-day! If many of these things have been taken from the home, they have only been taken that they may, as it were, be carried back and forth between the home and the school.

I have a friend, the mother of an only child, a boy of eight. Her husband's work requires that the family live in a section of the city largely populated by immigrants. The one school in the vicinity is a large public school. When my friend's little boy reached the "school age," he, perforce, was entered at this school.

"You are an American," his father said to him the day before school opened; "not a foreigner, like almost every child you will find at school. Remember that."

"He doesn't understand what you mean when you talk to him about being an American," the boy's mother said the next morning as we all watched the child run across the street to the school. "How could he, living among foreigners?"

One day, about two months later, the small boy's birthday being near at hand, his father said to him, "If some one were planning to give you something, what should you choose to have it?"

"A flag," the boy said instantly; "an American flag! Our flag!"

"Why?" the father asked, almost involuntarily.

"To salute," the child replied. "I've learned how in school—what to say and what to do. Americans do it when they love their country—like you told me to," he added, eagerly. "Our teacher says so. She's taught us all how to salute the flag. I told her I was an American, not a foreigner like the other children. And she said they could be Americans, too, if they wanted to learn how. So they are going to."

The small boy got his flag. The patriotism taught at home and the patriotism taught at school, diverse at other points, met and mingled at that one most fundamental point.

In former days children did not quote their teachers much at home, nor their parents much at school. They do both in these days; occasionally with comic results. A little girl of my acquaintance whose first year at school began less than a month ago has, I observed only yesterday, seemed to learn as her introductory lesson to pronounce the words "either" and "neither" quite unmistakably "āther" and "nāther."

"This is an amazing innovation," I said to her mother. "How did she ever happen to think of it?"

"Ask her," said her mother plaintively.

I did inquire of the little girl. "Whom have you heard say 'āther' and 'nāther'?"

"Nobody," she unexpectedly answered.

"Then how did you learn to say it?"

"Uncle Billy told me to—"

This uncle is an instructor of English in one of our most famous colleges. "My dear child," I protested, "you must have misunderstood him!"

"Oh, no," she affirmed earnestly. "You see, papa and mamma say 'eether' and 'neether,' and my school-teacher says 'eyether' and 'nyether.' I told papa and mamma, and they said to say them the way my teacher did; and I told my teacher, and she said to say them the way papa and mamma did! I couldn't say them two ways at once; and I didn't know which one way to say them. So Uncle Billy told me, if he were doing it, he wouldn't worry about it; he would say them 'āther' and 'nāther'!"

She is a very little girl, only seven; and she has not yet rounded out her first month of school. I suppose before she has been in school a full term she will have discovered the impracticability of her uncle's method of settling the vexed question as to the pronunciation of "either" and "neither." Very likely she will decide to say them "eyether" and "nyether," as her teacher does.

It takes the children so short a time to elevate the teacher to the rank of final arbiter in their intellectual world. So soon, they follow her footsteps in preference to any others along the ways of education. Not only do they pronounce words as she pronounces them; in so far as they are able, they define words as she defines them. In due course, they are a bit fearful of any knowledge obtained otherwise than as she teaches them to obtain it. Is there one of us who has attempted to help a child with "home lessons" who has not been obliged to reckon with this fact? Have we not worked out a problem in "bank discount," for instance, for a perplexed youthful mathematician, only to be told, hesitatingly, "Ye-es, you have got the right answer, but that isn't the way my teacher does bank discount. Don't you know how to do it as she does?" Or, with a young Latin "beginner" in the house, have we not tried to bring order out of chaos with respect to the "Bellum Gallicum" by translating, "All Gaul is divided into three parts," to be at once interrupted by, "Our teacher translates that, 'Gaul is, as a whole, divided into three parts.'" If we would assist the children of our immediate circles at all with their "home lessons," we must do it exactly after the manner and method ordained by their teachers.

This condition of things ought not to be displeasing to us, for the reason that, in the main, we have ourselves brought it to pass. The children, during their first days at school, are loyally ready to force the views of their fathers and their mothers, and their uncles and aunts, upon their teachers; and their teachers are tactfully ready to effect a compromise with them. But, before very long, our reiterated, "Your teacher knows; do as she says," has its effect. The teacher becomes the child's touchstone in relation to a considerable number of the "array of subjects" taught in a present-day school. School-teachers in America prepare themselves so carefully for their duties, train themselves to such a high order of skill in their performance, it is but just that those of us who are not teachers should abdicate in their favor.

However, since we are all very apt to be in entire accord with the children's teachers in all really vital matters, our position of second place in the minds of the boys and girls with regard to the ways of doing "bank discount" or translating "Gallia est omnes divisa in partes tres" is of small account. At least, we have a fuller knowledge of their own relations with these mathematical and Latinic things than our grandparents had of our parents' lessons. And the children's teachers know more about our relations to the subjects taught than the teachers of our fathers and mothers knew respecting the attitudes of our grandfathers and grandmothers toward the curriculum of that earlier time. For the children of to-day, unlike the children of a former time, talk at home about school and talk at school about home. Almost unconsciously, this effects an increasingly cooperative union between home and school.

"We are learning 'Paul Revere's Ride,' in school," I heard a small girl who lives in Boston say recently to her mother.

"Are you, darling?" the mother replied. "Then, shouldn't you like to go some Saturday and see the church where the lanterns were hung?"

So much did the child think she would like to go that her mother took her the next Saturday.

"You saw the very steeple at which Paul Revere looked that night for the lanterns!" I said, when, somewhat later, I happened to be again at that child's home.

"Twice," she replied. "I told my teacher that mother had taken me, so she took all of us in my room at school on the next Saturday."

Perhaps the most significant influence of the American home upon the American school is to be found in the regular setting apart of an hour of the school-day once, or twice, or even three times a week, as a story hour; and the filling of that hour with the stories, read or told, that in earlier times children never so much as heard mentioned at school by their teachers. It is indeed a pleasant thought that in school-rooms throughout the land boys and girls are hearing about the Argonauts, and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Crusaders; to say nothing of such famous personages in the story world as Cinderella, and the Sleeping Beauty, and Hop-O'-My-Thumb. The home story hour is no less dear because there is a school story hour too.

The other afternoon I stopped in during the story hour to visit a room in the school of my neighborhood. The teacher told the story of Pandora and the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. A small friend of mine is a member of the "grade" which occupies that room. At the end of the session she walked home with me.

"Tell me a story?" she asked, when, sitting cozily by the fire, we were having tea.

"What one should you like?" I inquired. "The story of Clytie, perhaps, or—"

"I'd like to hear the one about Pandora—"

"But you have just heard it at school!" I exclaimed.

"I know," she said; "but I'd like to hear you tell it."

When I had told it, she begged me to tell another. Again I suggested various tales in my repertory. But she refused them all. "Tell about the man, and the dragon, and the ball of string, and the lady—" she began.

And once more when I interposed, reminding her that she had just heard it, she once more said, "Yes; but I'd like to hear it again."

Some of the children whom I have in mind as I write go to private schools and some of them go to public schools. It has not seemed to me that the results obtained by the one type of school are discernibly different from those produced by the other. In the private school there are fewer pupils than in the public school; and they are more nearly alike from the point of view of their parents' material wealth than are the pupils in a public school. They are also "Americans," and not "foreigners," as are so many of the children in city public schools, and even in the public schools of many suburbs and villages. Possibly owing to their smaller numbers, they receive more individual attention than the pupils of the public school; but, so far as my rather extensive and intimate acquaintance with children qualifies me to judge, they learn the same lessons, and learn them with equal thoroughness. We hear a great deal about the differences between public and private schools, and certainly there are differences; but the pupils of the public and the private schools are very much alike. It is considerably easier to distinguish a public from a private school than it is to tell a public- school child from a private-school child.



There are many arraignments of our American schools, whether public or private; and there are many persons who shake their heads over our American school-children. "The schools are mere drilling-places," we hear, "where the children are all put through the same steps." And the children—what do we hear said of them? "They do not work at their lessons as children of one, two, or three generations ago did," is the cry; "school is made so pleasant for them!"

Unquestionably our American schools and our American school-children have their faults. We must try to amend both. Meanwhile, shall we not be grateful that the "steps" through which the children are put are such excellent ones; and shall we not rejoice that school is made so "pleasant" for the boys and girls that, unlike the children of one, two, or three generations ago, they like to go to school?



V



THE CHILD IN THE LIBRARY

One day, not long ago, a neighbor of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of honored memory, was talking to me about him. Among the score of charming anecdotes of the dear Colonel that she told me, there was one, the most delightful of all, that related to the time-worn subject of the child in the library. "As a family, we were readers," she said. "The importance of reading had been impressed upon our minds from our earliest youth. All of us liked to read, excepting one sister, younger than I. She cared little for it; and she seldom did it. I was a mere child, but so earnestly had I always been told that children who did not read would grow up ignorant that I worried greatly over my sister who would not read. At last I unburdened my troubled mind to Colonel Higginson. 'She doesn't like to read; she doesn't read,' I confided. 'I am afraid she will grow up ignorant; and then she will be ashamed! And think how we shall feel!' The Colonel considered my words in silence for a time. Then he said: 'There is a large and finely selected library in your house; don't be disturbed regarding your sister, my dear. She will not grow up ignorant. You see, she is exposed to books! She is certain to get something of what is in them!'"

Colonel Higginson's neighbor went on to say that from that day she was no longer haunted by the fear that her sister, because she did not read, would grow up ignorant. Are many of us in that same condition of feeling with respect to the children of our acquaintance, even after we have provided them with as excellent a library as had that other child in which they may be "exposed to books"? On the contrary, so solicitous are we that, having furnished to the best of our knowledge the best books, we do not rest until we are reasonably sure that the children are, not simply getting something from them, but getting it at the right times and in the right ways. And everything and every one conspires to help us. Publishers issue volumes by the dozen with such titles as "The Children's Reading" and "A Guide to Good Reading" and "Golden Books for Children." The librarian of the "children's room" in many a library sets apart a certain hour of each week or each month for the purpose of telling the children stories from the books that we are all agreed the children should read, hoping by this means to inspire the boys and girls to read the particular books for themselves. No effort is regarded as too great if, through it, the children seem likely to acquire the habit of using books; using them for work, and using them for recreation.

Certainly our labors in this direction on behalf of the children are amply rewarded. Not only are American children of the present time fond of reading—most children of other times have been that; they have a quite remarkable skill and ease in the use of books.

A short while ago, spending a spring week-end with a friend who lives in the country, I chanced to see a brilliant scarlet bird which neither my hostess nor I could identify. "It was a redbird, I suppose," I said, in mentioning it later to a city acquaintance.

"What is a redbird?" she asked. "Is it a cardinal, or a tanager, or something still different?"

"I don't know," I replied. "Perhaps," I added, turning to her little girl often who was in the room, "you know; children learn so much about birds in their 'nature study.'"

"No," the child answered; "but," she supplemented confidently, "I can find out."

Several days afterward she came to call. "Do you remember exactly the way that red bird you saw in the country looked?" she inquired, almost as soon as we met.

"Just red, I think," I said.

"Not with black wings?" she suggested.

"I hardly think so," I answered.

"P'aps it had a few white feathers in its wings?" she hinted.

"I believe not," I said.

"Then," she observed, with an air of finality, "it was a cardinal grosbeak; and the other name for that is redbird; so you saw a redbird. The scarlet tanager is red, too, but it has black wings, and it isn't called a redbird; and the crossbill is red, with a few white feathers, and it isn't called a redbird either. Only the cardinal grosbeak is. That was what you saw," she repeated.

"And who told you all this?" I queried.

"Nobody," the little girl made reply. "I looked it up in the library."

She was only ten. "How did you look it up?" I found myself asking.

"First," she explained, "I picked out the birds on the bird charts that were red. The charts told their names. Then I got out a bird book, and looked till I found where it told about those birds."

"Do you look up many things in the library?" I questioned.

"Oh, yes," the child replied.

"And do you always find them?" I continued.

"Not always by myself," she confessed. "Everything isn't as easy to look up as birds. But when I can't, there is always the librarian, and she helps; and when she is helping, 'most anything gets found!"

The public library of my small friend's city, not being the library I habitually used, was only slightly familiar to me. Not long after I had been so earnestly assured that the scarlet bird I had seen was a redbird, I made occasion to go to the library in which the information had been gathered. It was such a public library as may be seen in very nearly every small city in the United States. Built of stone; lighted and heated according to the most approved modern methods; divided into "stack-rooms" and "reading-rooms" and "receiving-rooms"—it was that "typical American library" of which we are, as we should be, so proud. I did not ask to be directed to the "children's room"; I simply followed a group of children who had come into the building with me.

The "children's room," too, was "typical." It was a large, sunny place, furnished with low bookcases, small tables, and chairs. Around two walls, above the shelves, were pictures of famous authors, and celebrated scenes likely to be known to children. At one end of the room the bird charts of which I had so interestingly heard were posted, together with flower charts and animal charts, of which I had not been told. At the other end was the desk of the librarian, who so helped young investigators that, when she helped, anything got found.

I seated myself at the little table nearest her desk. She smiled, but she said nothing. Neither did I say anything. The time of day was just after school; the librarian was too much occupied to talk to a stray visitor. I remained for fully an hour; and during that hour a steady stream of children passed in and out of the room. Some of them selected books, and, having obtained them, departed; others stayed to read, and others walked softly about, examining the pictures and charts. All of them, whatever their various reasons for coming to the library, began or ended their visits in conference with the librarian. They spoke just above a whisper, as befitted the place, but I was near enough to hear all that was said.

"We want to give a play at school the last day before Christmas vacation," said one small girl; "is there a good one here?"

The librarian promptly recommended and put into the child's hands a little volume entitled "Fairy Tales a Child Can Read and Act."

A boy, entering rather hurriedly, asked, "Could I have a book that tells how to make a wireless set—and have it quick, so I can begin to-day before dark?"

It was not a moment before the librarian found for him a book called "Wireless Telegraphy for Amateurs and Students."

Another boy, less on pleasure bent, petitioned for a "book about Abraham Lincoln that will tell things to put in a composition on him." And a girl, at whose school no Christmas play was apparently to be given, asked for "a piece of poetry to say at school just before Christmas." For these two, as for all who preceded or followed them, the librarian had help.

"How wonderful, how unique!" exclaimed an Italian friend to whom I related the experiences of that afternoon hour in the "children's room" in the library of that small city.

But it seems to me that the wonderful thing about it is that it is not unique; that in almost any "children's room" in almost any public library in America practically the same condition prevails. Not only are "children's rooms" of a very fine order to be found in great numbers; but children's librarians, as sympathetic and as capable as the librarian of my small friend's library, in as great numbers, are in charge of those rooms. So recognized a profession has theirs come to be that, connected with one of the most prominent libraries in the country, there is a "School for Children's Librarians."

The "children's librarians" do not stop at assisting them in choosing books. The story hour has come to be as important in the "children's rooms" as it is now in the school, as it has always been in the home. Telling stories to children has grown to be an art; there is more than one text-book laying down its "principles and laws." Many a librarian is also an accomplished story-teller, and in an increasing number of libraries there is a story hour in the "children's rooms." Beyond question, we in America have taken every care that our public libraries shall mean something more to the boys and girls than places in which they are merely "exposed to books."

American children read; it is doubtful whether any other children in the world read so much or so intelligently. In our public libraries we plan with such completeness for their reading that they can scarcely escape becoming readers! At home we keep constantly in mind the great importance of inculcating in them a love of books and a wontedness in their use. To so many of their questionings we reply by advising, "Get a book about it from the library." So many of the fundamental lessons of life we first bring to their attention by putting into their hands books treating of those lessons written by experts—written, moreover, expressly for parents to give to their boys and girls to read.

A few days ago I received a letter from a mother saying: "Do you know of a book on hygiene that I can give to my children to read—a book on that subject for children?"

Within reach of my hand I had such a book, entitled "The Child's Day," a simply, but scientifically, written little volume, telling children what to do from the hour of rising until the hour of retiring, in order to keep well and strong, able to do good work at school, and to enjoy as good play after school. It was a book that a child not only could read with profit, but would read with pleasure.

At about the same time a father said to me: "Is there any book written for children about good citizenship—a sort of primer of civics, I mean? I require something of that kind for my boy."

A book to meet that particular need, too, was on my book-shelves. "Lessons for Junior Citizens," it is called. In the clearest, and also the most charming, form it tells the boys and girls about the government, national and local, of their country, and teaches them their relation to that government.

It is safe to say that there is practically no subject so mature that it is not now the theme of a book, or a score of books, written especially for children. Every one of the numerous publishing houses in the United States issues yearly as many good volumes of this particular type as are submitted. A century ago a new writer was most likely to win the interest of a publisher by sending him a manuscript subtitled, "A Novel." At the present time a beginner can more quickly awaken the interest of a publisher by submitting a manuscript the title of which contains the words, "For Children."

"Authors' editions" of books we have long had offered us by publishers; "editions de luxe" too; and "limited editions of fifty copies, each copy numbered." These are all old in the world of books. What is new, indeed, is the "children's edition." We have it in many shapes, from "Dickens for Children" to "The Children's Longfellow." These volumes find their way into the "children's rooms" of all our public libraries; and, quite as surely, they help to fill the "children's bookcases" in the private libraries to be found in a large proportion of American homes. For no public library can take the place in the lives of the children of a private library made up of their "very own" books. The public library may, however, often have a predominant share in determining the selection of those "very own" books. The children wish to possess such books as they have read in the "children's room."

Sometimes a child has still another similar reason for wishing to own a certain book. Only the other day I had a letter from a boy to whom I had sent a copy of "The Story of a Bad Boy." "I am glad to have it," he said. "The library has it, and father has it. I like to have what the library and father have."

Parents buy books for their children in very much the proportions that parents bought them before the land was dotted with public libraries. Indeed, they buy books in larger proportions, for the reason that there are so many more books to be bought! The problem of the modern father or mother is not, as it once was, to discover a volume likely to interest the children; but, from among the countless volumes offered for sale, all certain to interest the children, to choose one, two, or three that seem most excellent where all are so good. A mother of a few generations ago whose small boy was eager to read tales of chivalry simply gave him "Le Morte D'Arthur"; there was no "children's edition" of it, no "Boy's King Arthur," no "Tales of the Round Table." The father whose little girl desired to read for herself the stories of Greece he had told her put into her hands Bulfinch's "Age of Fable"; he could not, as can fathers to-day, give her Kingsley's rendering, or Hawthorne's, or Miss Josephine Preston Peabody's. Like the father of Aurora Leigh,—

"He wrapt his little daughter in his large Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no."

At the present time we do not often see a child wrapped in a large man's doublet of a book; even more seldom do we see a father careless if it fit or no. What we plainly behold is that doublet, cut down, and most painstakingly fitted to the child's little mind.

Unquestionably the children lose something by this. The great books of the world do not lend themselves well to making over. "Tales from Shakespeare" are apt to leave out Shakespeare's genius, and "Stories from Homer" are not Homer. In cutting the doublet to fit, the most precious part of the fabric is in danger of being sacrificed.

But whatever the children lose when they are small, they find again when they come to a larger growth. Most significant of all, when they find it, they recognize it. A little girl who is a friend of mine had read Lambs' "Tales." The book had been given to her when she was eight years old. She is nine now. One day, not long ago, she was lingering before my bookcases, taking out and glancing through various volumes. Suddenly she came running to me, a copy of "As You Like It" in her hand. "This story is in one of my books!" she cried.

"Yes," I said; "your book was written from this book, and some of those other little red books there with it in the bookcase."

The child went back to the bookcase. She took down all the other volumes of Shakespeare, and, sitting on the rug with them, she spent an utterly absorbed hour in turning over their leaves. Finally she scrambled to her feet and set the books back in their places. "I've found which stories in these books are in my book, too," she remarked. "Mine are easier to read," she added; "but yours have lovely talk in them!"

Had she not read Lambs' "Tales" at eight I am not certain she would have ventured into the wide realms of Shakespeare at nine, and tarried there long enough to discover that in those realms there is "lovely talk."

Occasionally, to be sure, the children insist upon books being easy to read, and refuse to find "lovely talk" in them if they are not. It was only a short time ago that I read to a little boy Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin." When I had finished there was a silence. "Do you like it?" I inquired.

"Ye-es," replied my small friend; "it's a nice story, but it's nicer in my book than in yours. I'll bring it next time I come, so you can read it."

He did. The story was told in prose. It began, "There was once a town, named Hamelin, and there were so many rats in it that the people did not know what to do." Certainly this is "easier to read" than the forty-two lines which the poem uses to make an identical statement regarding the town named Hamelin. My little friend is only six. I hope that by the time he is twelve he will think the poem is as "nice" as, if not "nicer" than, the story in his book. At least he may be impelled by the memory of his pleasure in his book to turn to my book and compare the two versions of the tale.

The children of to-day, like the children of former days, read because they find in books such stuff as dreams are made of; and, in common with the children of all times, they must needs make dreams. Like the boys and girls of most eras, they desire to make also other, more temporal, things. To aid them in this there are books in quantities and of qualities not even imagined by the children of a few generations ago. The book the title of which begins with the words "How to Make" is perhaps the most distinctive product of the present-day publishing house. No other type of book can so effectively win to a love for reading a child who seems indifferent to books; who, as a boy friend of mine used to say, "would rather hammer in nails than read." The "How to Make" books tell such a boy how to hammer in nails to some purpose. I happened to see recently a volume called "Boys' Make-at-Home Things." With much curiosity I turned its pages,—pages illustrated with pictures of the make-at-home things of the title,—glancing at directions for constructing a weather-vane, a tent, a sled, and a multitude of smaller articles. I thought of my boyfriend. "Do you think he would care to have the book?" I inquired of his mother over the telephone.

"Well, I wish he would care to have any book!" she replied. "If you want to try this one—" She left the sentence unfinished, unless a sigh may be regarded as a conclusion.

I did try the book. "This will tell you how to have fun with your tools," I wrote, when I sent it to the boy.

Except for a laconic note of thanks, I heard nothing from my young friend about the book. One day last week I chanced to see his mother. "What do you think I am doing this afternoon?" she said. "I am getting a book for my son, at his own request! He is engrossed in that book you sent him. He is making some of the things described in it. But he wants to make something not mentioned in it, and he actually asked me to see if I could find a book that told how!"

"So he likes books better now?" I commented.

"Well—I asked him if he did," said the boy's mother; "and he said he didn't like 'booky' books any better, but he liked this kind, and always would have, if he'd known about them!"

Whether my boy friend will learn early to love "booky" books is a bit doubtful perhaps; certainly, however, he has found a companion in one kind of book. He has made the discovery quickly, too; for he has had "Boys' Make-at-Home Things" less than a month.

It was an easy matter for that boy's mother to get for her son the particular book he desired. She lives in a city; at least three large public libraries are open to her. As for book-shops, there are more within her reach than she could possibly visit in the course of a week, much less in an afternoon.

The mothers who live in the country cannot so conveniently secure the books their boys and girls may wish or need. I know one woman, the mother of two boys, living in the country, who has to exercise considerable ingenuity to provide her sons with books of the "How to Make" kind. There is no public library within available distance of the farmhouse which is her home, and she and her husband cannot afford to buy many books for their children. The boys, moreover, like so great a variety of books that, in order to please them, it is not necessary to select a book that is not "booky." Their parents are lovers of great literature. "I cannot bring myself to buy a book about how to make an aeroplane, for instance," their mother said to me one day, "when there are so many wonderful books they have not read, and would enjoy reading! Since I must limit my purchase of books, I really think I ought to choose only the real books for the boys; and yet they want to make things with their hands, like other boys, and there is no way to teach them how except through books. My husband has no time for it, and there is no one else to show them."

The next summer I went to spend a few days with my friend in the country. The morning after my arrival her boys proposed to take me "over the place." At the lower edge of the garden, to which we presently came, there was a little brook. Across it was a bridge. It was plainly to be seen that this bridge was the work of the boys. "How very nice it is!" I remarked.

"We made it," the older of the boys instantly replied.

"Who showed you how?" I queried, wondering, as I spoke, if my friend had, after all, changed her mind with respect to the selection of books for her children, and chosen one "How to Make" volume.

"It told how in a book," the younger boy said; "a Latin book father studied out of when he was a boy. There was a picture of the bridge; and on the pages in the back of the book the way to make it was all written out in English—father had done it when he was in school. It was a long time before we could quite see how to do it; but mother helped, and the picture showed how, and father thought we could do it if we kept at it. And it is really a good bridge—you can walk across on it."

When the boys and I returned to the house my friend greeted me with a merry smile. As soon as we were alone she exclaimed, "I have so wanted to write to you about our bridge, patterned on Caesar's! But the boys are so proud of it, they like to 'surprise' people with it—not because it is like a bridge Caesar made, but because it is a bridge they have made themselves!"



Another friend of mine, the mother of a little girl, has had a different problem, centring around the necessity of books for children, to solve. She, too, lives in the country, and her little girl is a pupil at the neighboring district school. During a visit in the city home of a cousin the small girl had been a spectator at the city child's "school play," which happened to consist of scenes from "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." When she returned home, she wished to have such an entertainment in her school. "Dearest," her mother said, "we have no books of plays children could act."

"Couldn't we do the one they did at Cousin Rose's school?" was the next query. "Papa says we have that."

"I am afraid not," her mother demurred. "Ask your teacher."

The child approached her teacher on the subject. "No," the teacher said decisively. "'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' is too long and too hard. Read it, and you'll see. But," she sagely added, "if you can find anything that is suitable, and can persuade the other children to act in it, I will help you all I can."

That evening, at home, the little girl read "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." "Mamma," she suddenly cried, as she neared the end, "my teacher says this is too long and too hard for us children to do. But we could do the play that the people in it do—don't you think? It is very short, and all the children will like it because it is about poor Pyramus and Thisbe, that we have all read about in school. It isn't just the same as the way it was in the story we read; but it is about them—and the wall, and the lion, and everything! Don't you think we could do it? They did the fairy part when I saw it at Cousin Rose's school, and not this at all. But couldn't we?"

"I did not like to discourage her," my friend said when she related the tale to me. "All the other children were willing and eager to do it, so her teacher couldn't refuse, after what she had said, to help them. I helped with the rehearsals, too, and I doubt if the teacher or I ever laughed so much in all our lives as we did at that time—when there were no children about! The children were so sweet and serious over their play! They acted it as they would have acted a play on the subject of Pyramus and Thisbe written especially for them. They weren't funny. No; they were perfectly lovely. What was so irresistibly comic, of course, was the difference between their performance and one's remembrance of regular performances of it—to say nothing of one's thoughts as to what Shakespeare would have said about it. How those children will laugh when they are grown up! They will have something to laugh at that will last them a lifetime. But poor Shakespeare!"

I did not echo these final words of my friend. For does not Shakespeare rather particularly like to bless us with the laugh that lasts a lifetime, even if—perhaps especially if—it be at our own expense?

Books are such integral parts of the lives of present-day children, especially in America. Their elders appreciate, as possibly the grown- ups of former times did not quite so fully appreciate, the importance of books in the education of the boys and girls. It may even be that we over-emphasize it a bit. We send the children to the book-shelves for help in work and for assistance in play. In effect, we say to them, "Read, that you may be able to mark, learn, and inwardly digest." It is only natural that the boys and girls should read for a hundred reasons, instead of for the one reason of an older day—the pursuit of happiness in the mere reading itself. "How can you sit idly reading a book when there are so many useful things you might be doing?" was the question often put to the children of yesterday by their elders. To-day we feel that the children can hardly do anything likely to prove more useful than reading a book. Is not this because we have taught them, not only to read, but to read for a diversity of reasons?

American children are so familiarly at home in the world of books, it should not surprise us to find them occasionally taking rather a practical, everyday view of some of the things read. A little girl friend of mine chanced to begin her reading of Shakespeare during a winter when her grown-up relatives were spending a large portion of their leisure going to see stage representations of Shakespeare's plays. She therefore heard considerable conversation about the plays, and about the persons acting the chief roles in them. It happened that "As You Like It" was one of the comedies being acted. The little girl was invited to go to see it. "Who is going to be Orlando?" she inquired; she had listened to so much talk about who "was," or was "going to be," the various persons in the several dramas!

"But," she objected, when she was informed, "I think I've heard you say he is not very tall. Orlando was such a tall man!"

"Was he?" I ventured, coming in at that moment. "I don't remember that about him. Who told you he was tall?"

"Why, it is in the book!" she exclaimed.

Every one present besought her to mention where.

"Don't you remember?" she said incredulously. "He says Rosalind is just as high as his heart; that wouldn't be quite up to his shoulder. And she says she is more than common tall! So he must have been 'specially tall. Don't you remember?" she asked again, looking perplexedly at our blank faces.

There are so many bonds of understanding between American children of the present time and their grown-up relatives and friends. Is not one of the best of these that which has come out of our national impulse toward giving the boys and girls the books we love, "cut small"; and showing them how to read those books as we read the larger books from which they are made? "What kinds of books do American children read?" foreigners inquire. We are able to reply, "The same kinds that grown-up Americans read." "And why do they read them?" may be the next question. Again we can answer, "For much the same reasons that the grown-ups read them." "How do they use the libraries?" might be the next query. Still we could say, "As grown people use them." And if yet another query, "Why?" be put, we might reply, "Because, unlike any other children in the world, American children are almost as completely 'exposed to books' as are their elders."



VI



THE CHILD IN CHURCH

Within the past few months, I have had the privilege of looking over the answers sent by men and women—most of them fathers and mothers—living in many sections of the United States, in response to an examination paper containing among other questions this one: "Should church-going on the part of children be compulsory or voluntary?" In almost every case the answer was, "It should be voluntary." In practically all instances the reason given was, "Worship, like love, is at its best only when it is a free-will offering."

It was not a surprise to read again and again, in longer or in shorter form, such an answer, based upon such a reason. The religious liberty of American children of the present day is perhaps the most salient fact of their lives. Without doubt, the giving to them of this liberty is the most remarkable fact in the lives of their elders. No grown people were ever at any time willingly allowed to exercise such freedom in matters pertaining to religion as are the children of our nation at the present time. Not only is churchgoing not compulsory; religion itself is voluntary.

A short while ago a little girl friend of mine was showing me her birthday gifts. Among them was a Bible. It was a beautiful book, bound in soft crimson leather, the child's name stamped on it in gold.

"And who gave you this?" I asked.

"Father," the little girl replied. "See what he has written in it," she added, when the shining letters on the cover had been duly appreciated.

I turned to the fly-leaf and read this:

"To my daughter on her eighth birthday from her father.

"'I give you the end of a golden string: Only wind it into a ball,— It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall.'"

"Isn't it lovely?" questioned the child, who had stood by, waiting, while I read.

"Yes," I agreed, "very lovely, and very new."

Her mother, who was listening, smiled slowly. "My father gave me a Bible on my birthday, when I was seven"—she began.

"O mother," interrupted her little girl, "what did grandfather write in it?"

"Go and look," her mother said. "You will find it on the table by my bed."

The child eagerly ran out of the room. In a few moments she returned, the Bible of her mother's childhood in her hands. It also was a beautiful book; bound, too, in crimson leather, and with the name of its owner stamped on it in gold. And on the fly-leaf was written,—

"To my daughter, on her seventh birthday, from her father."

Beneath this, however, was inscribed no modern poetry, but

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them."



The little girl read it aloud. "It sounds as though you wouldn't be happy if you didn't remember, mother," she said, dubiously.

"Well, darling," her mother replied, "and so you wouldn't."

The child took her own Bible and read aloud the verse her father had written. "But, mother, this sounds as though you would be happy if you did remember."

"And so you will, dear," her mother made reply. "It is the same thing," she added.

"Is it?" the little girl exclaimed in some surprise. "It doesn't seem quite the same."

The child did not press the question. She left us, to return her mother's Bible to its wonted place. When she came back, she resumed the exhibiting of her birthday gifts where it had been interrupted. But after she had gone out to play I said to her mother, "Are they quite the same—the text in your Bible and the lines in hers?"

"It is rather a long way from Solomon to William Blake, isn't it?" she exclaimed.

"But I really don't see much difference. The same thing is said, only in the one case it is a command and in the other it is an impelling suggestion."

"Isn't that rather a great deal of difference?" I ventured.

"No, I think not," she said, meditatively. "Of course, I admit," she supplemented, "that the idea of an impelling suggestion appeals to the imagination more than the idea of a command. But that's the only difference."

It seems to me that this "only" difference is at the very foundation of the religious training of the children of the present day in our country. We do our best to awaken their imaginations, to put to them suggestions that will impel, to say to them the "same thing" that was said to the children of more austere times about remembering their Creator; but so to say it that they feel, not that they will be unhappy if they do not remember, but that they will be happy if they do. It is the love of God rather than the fear of God that we would have them know.

Is it not, indeed, just because we do so earnestly desire that they should learn this that we leave them so free with regard to what we call their spiritual life? "Read a chapter in your Bible every day, darling," I recently heard a mother say to her little girl on the eve of her first visit away from home without her parents. "In Auntie's house they don't have family prayers, as we do, so you won't hear a chapter read every day as you do at home."

"What chapters shall I read, mamma?" the child asked.

"Any you choose, dear," the mother replied.

"And when in the day?" was the next question. "Morning or night?"

"Just as you like, dearest," the mother answered.

But there is a religious liberty beyond this. To no one in America is it so readily, so sympathetically, given as to a child. We are all familiar with the difficulties which attend a grown person, even in America, whose convictions necessitate a change of religious denomination. Such a situation almost invariably means distress to the family, and to the relinquished church of the person the form of whose faith has altered. In few other matters is so small a measure of liberty understandingly granted a grown person, even in America. But when a child would turn from one form of belief to another, how differently the circumstance is regarded!

One Sunday, not long ago, visiting an Episcopal Sunday-school, I saw in one of the primary classes a little girl whose parents, as I was aware, were members of the Baptist Church.

"Is she a guest?" I asked her teacher.

"Oh, no," she replied; "she is a regular member of the Sunday-school; she comes every Sunday. She was christened at Easter; I am her godmother."

"But don't her father and mother belong to the Baptist Church?" I questioned.

"Yes," said the child's Sunday-school teacher. "But she came to church one Sunday with some new playmates of hers, whose parents are Episcopalians, to see a baby christened. Then her little friends told her how they had all been christened, as babies; and when she found that she hadn't been, she wanted to be. So her father and mother let her, and she comes to Sunday-school here."

"Where does she go to church?" I found myself inquiring.

"To the Baptist Church, with her father and mother," was the reply. "She asked them to let her come to Sunday-school here; but it never occurred to her to think of going to church excepting with them."

Somewhat later I chanced to meet the child's mother. It was not long before she spoke to me concerning her little girl's membership in the Episcopal Sunday-school. "What were her father and I to do?" the mother said. "We didn't feel justified in standing in her way. She wanted to be christened; it seemed to mean something real to her—" she broke off. "What were we to do?" she repeated. "It would be a dreadful thing to check a child's aspiration toward God! Of course she is only a little girl, and she wanted to be like the others. Her father and I thought of that, naturally. But—" Again she stopped. "One can never tell," she went on, "what is in the mind of a child, nor what may be happening to its spirit. Samuel was a very little child when God spoke to him," she concluded, simply.

Quite as far as that mother, has another mother of my acquaintance let her little girl go along the way of religious freedom. One day I went with her and the child to an Italian jewelry shop. Among the things there was a rosary of coral and silver. The little girl, attracted by its glitter and color, seized it and slipped it over her head. "Look, mother," she said, "see this lovely necklace!"

Her mother gently took it from her. "It isn't a necklace," she explained; "it is called a rosary. You mustn't play with it; because it is something some people use to say their prayers with."

The child's mother is of Scotch birth and New England upbringing. The little girl has been accustomed to a form of religion and to an attitude toward the things of religion that are beautiful, but austerely beautiful. She is an imaginative child; and she caught eagerly at the poetical element thus, for the first time, associated with prayer. "Tell me how!" she begged.

When next I was in the little girl's bedroom, I saw the coral and silver rosary hanging on one of the head-posts of her bed. "Yes, my dear," her mother explained to me, "I got the rosary for her. She wanted it—'to say my prayers with,' she said; so I got it. After all, the important thing is that she says her prayers."

Among my treasures I have a rosary, brought to me from the Holy Land. I have had it for a long time, and it has hung on the frame of a photograph of Bellini's lovely Madonna. This little girl has always liked that picture, and she has often spoken to me about it. But she had never mentioned the rosary, which not only is made of dark wood, but is darker still with its centuries of age. One day after the rosary of pink coral and bright silver had been given her she came to see me. Passing through the room where the Madonna is, she stopped to look at it. At once she exclaimed, "You have a rosary!"

"Yes," I said; "it came from the Holy Land." I took it down, and put it into her hands. "It has been in Bethlehem," I went on, "and in Jerusalem. It is very old; it belonged to a saint—like St. Francis, who was such friends with the birds, you remember."

"I suppose the saint used it to say his prayers with?" the little girl observed. Then, the question evidently occurring to her for the first time, she asked, eagerly, "What prayers did he say, do you think?"

When I had in some part replied, I said, this question indeed occurring to me for the first time, "What prayers do you say?"

"Oh," she replied, instantly, "I say, 'Our Father,' and 'Now I lay me,' and 'God bless' all the different ones at home, and in other places, that I know. I say all that; and it takes all the beads. So I say, 'The Lord is my Shepherd' last, for the cross." She was silent for a moment, but I said nothing, and she went on. "I know 'In my Father's house are many mansions,' and 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels.' I might say them sometimes instead, mightn't I?"

I told this to one of my friends who is a devout Roman Catholic. "It shows," she said, "what the rosary can do for religion!"

But it seemed to me that it showed rather what religion could do for the rosary. Had the child's mother, Scotch by birth, New England by breeding, not been a truly religious woman she would not have bade her little girl handle with reverence the emblem of a faith so unlike her own; she would not have said, "Don't play with it." As for the small girl, had she never learned to "say prayers," she would not have desired the rosary to say them "with." And it was not the silver cross hanging on her rosary that influenced her to "say last," for it, the best psalm and "spiritual song" she knew; it was the understanding she had been given by careful teaching of the meaning of that symbol. Above all, had the little girl, after being taught to pray, not been left free to pray as her childish heart inclined, that rosary would scarcely have found a place on the head-post of her small bed.

It may be for the very reason that the children are not compelled to think and to feel in the things of religion as their parents do that fathers and mothers in America so frankly tell their boys and girls exactly what they do think and just how they do feel. The children may not ever understand the religious experiences through which their parents are passing, but they often know what those experiences are. Moreover, they sometimes partake of them.

Among my child friends there is a little girl, an only child, whose father died not a great while ago. The little girl had always had a share in the joys of her parents. It surprised no one who knew the family that the mother in her grief turned to the child for comfort; and that together they bore their great bereavement. Indeed, so completely did this occur that the little girl for a time hardly saw any one excepting her mother and her governess. After a suitable interval, an old friend of the family approached the mother on the subject. "Your little girl is only eight years old," she said, gently. "Oughtn't she perhaps to go to see her playmates, and have them come to see her, again, now?"

The mother saw the wisdom of the suggestion. The child continued to spend much of her time with her mother, but she gradually resumed her former childish occupations. She had always been a gregarious little girl; once more her nursery was a merry, even an hilarious, place.

One Saturday a short time ago she was among the six small guests invited to the birthday luncheon of another little girl friend of mine. Along with several other grown-ups I had been invited to come and lend a hand at this festivity. I arrived just as the children were going into the dining-room, where the table set forth for their especial use, and bright with the light of the seven candles on the cake, safely placed in the centre, awaited them. They climbed into their chairs, and then all seven of them paused. "Mother," said the little girl of the house, "who shall say grace?"

"I can!"

"Let me!"

"I always do at home!"

These and other exclamations were made before the mother could reply. When she was able to get a hearing, she suggested, "I think each one of you might, since you all can and would like to."