ned, hoping that the trailing clouds of glory so recently
departed had left some trace of illumination in this their first
expression in earth's language of their feelings and emotions. But we
found them very mundane. Most of the conversation concerned their
"saman," a comprehensive Indian word used by people with limited
vocabularies to express all manner of things to play with. Their "saman"
was various. Dolls, of course, and the remnants of dolls; tins and the
lids thereof; bits of everything which could break; corks, stones,
seeds, half cocoa-nut shells; rags of many ages and colours; scraped
down morsels of brick; withered flowers and leaves; sticks of all sorts
and sizes; English Christmas cards, sometimes with much domestic
information on the back; unauthorised sundries from the
kindergarten--delivered up with a smile intended to assure you that they
were only being kept for Sittie; and puchies. Puchies are insects. We
have one baby who collects puchies. "Look!" she said, one morning before
prayers, "Deah little five puchies!" and she opened her hand and five
red and black beetles crawled slowly out, to the delight of the devout,
who scrambled up from their orderly rows with shrieks of appreciation.

But if the babies' conversation was unenlightening, their chosen
avocations are not uninteresting. They are always busy about something,
and, from their point of view, something important. There are, of
course, some among the thirty who are unimaginative and unenterprising.
These sit in the sand and play. Others have more to do. Life to them is
full of the unknown. The unknown is full of possibilities. The great
thing is to experiment. Nothing is too insignificant to explore, and all
five senses are useful to the thoroughly competent baby.

They knew, of course, all the flowers, and the discovery of anything
fresh was always followed by a scene which suggested a colony of
small and active ants hauling some large object to their nest; for the
nearest grown-up person was invariably hailed, and pulled, and pushed,
and hurried along till the "new flower" was reached. Then, if the object
was incautious enough to stoop down to examine it, the ants, ant-wise,
would envelope it, climbing, swarming all over it, till there was
nothing to be seen but ants.

[Illustration: CHILDREN WADING.]

They knew the habits of caterpillars, and especially they had knowledge
about the wonderful silver chrysalis which pins itself to the po