sensibilities are moved, he imitates them, and in imitation his habits are formed. It is, therefore, most important that while his habits are crystallizing, his associates be of superior char. acter, and if an underbred maid or street gamin are his sole companions, what can one hope for? By a varied contact, by receiving suggestions from many sources instead of from only one or two, he is compelled to make a choice, and thus in the stress of the conflict of suggestions the conscience is born and his ethical life dawns. The friendships and companions should not, therefore, be too limited, but should have some variety, for variety of association is the soul of originality.

By imitation the child learns to understand. When he is imitating the fluttering and flight of the bird or butterfly, he is entering into sympathy with bird and butterfly life; when the boy, as father bird, roams out in search of the worms for his baby birds, he not only experiences the feelings of the father bird, but the instincts of fatherhood, protection, and responsibility are fostered in his own breast. As she plays the mother sheep caring for her white lambkins, the little girl's maternal instincts are quickened, and she is for the moment the mother of white lambkins, and learns to love her flock. In all Froebel's plays he mirrors the instinct of universal life; he makes the child undergo "a

systematized sequence of experience through which he grows into self-knowledge, clear observation and unconscious perception of, the whole circle of relationships," until the symbols of the plays become the truth symbolized in the child's character and personality. Froebel believes in positives, not negatives in teaching; in stimulants instead of in deterrents. Every child is on the warpath for something to do, and his interest is in objects, in the concrete; he wants his senses fed, he wants to examine, to feel, to see and hear the material things of this, to him, new world, and when he has taken in the living facts, when he has perceived, compared, and been instructed in his surroundings, then he is ready to see and hear what others have seen and heard. He must first know objects, then thoughts and their progress.

As soon as the child attains consciousness, he manifests a taste for imitating every live thing with which he comes in contact; first the sounds of the rooster, the dog, cat and cow; then the actions and instincts of these animals should be observed. He also personifies still life, and his father's cane becomes an uncontrollable charger, which he seeks to tame. The little girl showers on her rag babies all the love and affection which she has herself received from her own mother; every toy, no matter how damaged or memberless, plays a part in her

dramatic imagination, and the child meanwhile grows in sympathy and in comprehension of the ever widening circle of human relationships. "Every conscious intellectual phase of the mind is preceded by the symbolic stage." The child illumines with his imagination all the realties that surround him and tries to combine his fancy with the fact; he overlooks most glaring deficiencies for the purpose of his play; a wooden post makes a superb father, and a chair or table a most satisfactory mother, and the fertility of his mind is manifest in the use he makes of the materials supplied by his environment. As the play progresses the pictures of father and mother emerge strangely like the ones in the next room; the quality of his own father and mother speak out to the life in their wooden representatives; the tenderness, care, dignity, self-denial of the mother are all depicted, and alas! also any impatience or other imperfection of which she may have been guilty. The child sacrifices nothing to ideality—he is an intense realist. One may truly say that heredity does not end, but only begins at birth.

These plays embody very rich lessons for the child. In the enactment of the.rôle of mother, so often played by little girls, in the kindly offices which she takes pleasure in performing for others, in her noble self-denial for her imaginary

child, in her sense of responsibility then assumed, the little player receives direct valuable education, none the less so because it is unconsciously imbibed. In impersonating the good qualities of her mother, she has also appreciated them, and by frequent repeatings they become ingrained in her nature. If good qualities predominate in the parents, then more good qualities will be reflected in the little imitation; qualities of the opposite character are likewise reflected. If, then, by the imitations of its environment the child's nature is formed and instructed, how carefully guarded should be that environment; how the mother should every moment protect her little one from evil, stimulate it to good, how she should use its games and plays to instil right impressions, direct its communications with nature, and give it contact only with goodness, beauty and wisdom.

Parents labor hard and self-sacrificingly for their child's material welfare and advancement, but too often the mental growth, the formation of its character and personality is left to chance, or to beings so ignorant and incompetent, if not immoral, that in their unfitness for better things they engage to attend a child. The child's attendant is often the least capable, most poorly compensated domestic in the household, when she should be the superior, and the best paid. Pater-familias pays forty dollars per

month to some one to care for his horses, and from ten to fifteen dollars for a maid to care for his child. What matters it if cobwebs hang in the corners, so long as none enter the child's brain; what signifies it whether the kitchen chef is adept at making entrées or pastries if the child's heart and soul remain pure and healthy? Sidney Smith says, "If you make children happy now, you will make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it." Let the child have a joyous, natural, happy childhood in the best sense of happiness; not by indulging selfish, rude propensities, but by directing wisely his instincts into self-forgetfulness, and consideration of the rights of all around him, by unlocking to him the significance of family and social relationships that he may grow in sympathy with them.

"The further intellectual advantages of play are the demands for concentration of attention on the details and exigencies of the game, the quick judgment necessary to success, and the determined effort to execute the player's own decision. These requirements produce the most important of intellectual results-The coördination of the different parts of the brain; they develop mental alertness, directness in conclusions, and the tendency to execute these conclusions wisely and skilfully to the full extent of the individual's power.'