The American Child | Page 2

much" that we do for them is done in order to teach them just that--to do. It is a large and many-sided and varicolored desire, and to follow its leadings is an arduous labor; but is there one of us who knows a child well who has not this desire, and who does not cheerfully perform that labor? Having decided in so far as we are able what were good to do, we try, not only to do it ourselves, in our grown-up way, but so to train the children that they, too, may do it, in their childish way. The various means that we find most helpful to the end of our own doing we secure for the children,--adapting them, simplifying them, and even re-shaping them, that the boys and girls may use them to the full.
There is, of course, a certain impersonal quality in a great deal of what we, in America, do for children. It is not based so much on friendship for an individual child as on a sense of responsibility for the well-being of all childhood, especially all childhood in our own country. But most of what we do, after all, we do for the boys and girls whom we know and love; and we do it because they are our friends, and we wish them to share in the good things of our lives,--our work and our play. To what amazing lengths we sometimes go in this "doing for" the children of our circles!
One Saturday afternoon, only a few weeks ago, I saw at the annual exhibit of the State Board of Health, a man, one of my neighbors, with his little eight-year old boy. The exhibit consisted of the customary display of charts and photographs, showing the nature of the year's work in relation to the milk supply, the water supply, the housing of the poor, and the prevention of contagious diseases. My neighbor is not a specialist in any one of these matters; his knowledge is merely that of an average good citizen. He went from one subject to the other, studying them. His boy followed close beside him, looking where his father looked,--if with a lesser interest at the charts, with as great an intentness at the photographs. As they made their way about the room given over to the exhibit, they talked, the boy asking questions, the father endeavoring to answer them.
The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the room to me. "What are you looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with from!"
"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Saturday afternoon?" I remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the other side of the room, out of hearing.
"Not at all!" asserted the child's father. "He was inquiring the other day why he had been vaccinated, why all the children at school had been vaccinated. Just before that, he had asked where the water in the tap came from. This is just the place for him right now! It isn't odd at all for him to be here on a Saturday afternoon. It is much odder for me" he continued with a smile. "I'd naturally be playing golf! But when children begin to ask questions, one has to do something about answering them; and coming here seemed to be the best way of answering these newest questions of my boy's. I want him to learn about the connection of the state with these things; so he will be ready to do his part in them, when he gets to the 'voting age.'"
"But can he understand, yet?" I ventured.
"More than if he hadn't seen all this, and heard about what it means," my neighbor replied.
It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far- reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we should "do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as may be within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor character, we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered.
"Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a scrap of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the baby of the family, "why are the threads of this cloth pink when you unravel it one way, and white when you unravel it the other?"
The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to the child about the warp and the woof in weaving.
"I don't quite see