olish lady. "_But what had Caudle ever done to improve Mrs.
Caudle's mind_?" Had he ever sought, with intelligent illuminating
conversation, to direct her thoughts towards other topics than lent
umbrellas and red-headed minxes?

It is my complaint against so many of our teachers. They scold us for
what we do, but so rarely tell us what we ought to do. Tell me how to
talk to my baby, and I am willing to try. It is not as if I took a
personal pride in the phrase: "Did ums." I did not even invent it. I
found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it
soothes the Child. When he is howling, and I say "Did ums" with
sympathetic intonation, he stops crying. Possibly enough it is
astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him. Maybe it
is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection
that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him. But
may not even this be useful to him? He has got to meet with stupid
people in the world. Let him begin by contemplating me. It will make
things easier for him later on. I put forward the idea in the hope of
comforting the young gentleman from Cambridge.

We injure the health of the Child by enforcing on it silence. We have a
stupid formula that children should be seen and not heard. We deny it
exercise to its lungs. We discourage its natural and laudable curiosity
by telling it not to worry us--not to ask so many questions.

Won't somebody lend the young gentleman from Cambridge a small and
healthy child just for a week or so, and let the bargain be that he lives
with it all the time? The young gentleman from Cambridge thinks, when we
call up the stairs to say that if we hear another sound from the nursery
during the next two hours we will come up and do things to that Child the
mere thought of which should appal it, that is silencing the Child. It
does not occur to him that two minutes later that Child is yelling again
at the top of its voice, having forgotten all we ever said.

The Child of Fiction.

I know the sort of Child the weeper over Children's wrongs has in his
mind. It has deep, soulful, yearning eyes. It moves about the house
softly, shedding an atmosphere of patient resignation. It says: "Yes,
dear papa." "No, dear mamma." It has but one ambition--to be good and
useful. It has beautiful thoughts about the stars. You don't know
whether it is in the house or isn't: you find