rience in witnessing the gratification and improvement
of the child, if she really loves him, and is seriously interested in the
development of his thinking and reasoning powers.

_Answers should attempt to communicate but little Instruction_.

3. The answers which are given to children should not only be short and
simple in form, but each one should be studiously designed to communicate
as small an amount of information as possible.

[Illustration: "MOTHER, WHAT MAKES IT SNOW?"]

This may seem, at first view, a strange idea, but the import of it simply
is that, in giving the child his intellectual nourishment, you must act as
you do in respect to his bodily food--that is, divide what he is to receive
into small portions, and administer a little at a time. If you give him too
much at once in either case, you are in danger of choking him.

For example, Johnny asks some morning in the early winter, when the first
snow is falling, and he has been watching it for some time from the window
in wonder and delight, "Mother, what makes it snow?" Now, if the mother
imagines that she must give any thing like a full answer to the question,
her attention must be distracted from her work to enable her to frame it;
and if she does not give up the attempt altogether, and rebuke the boy for
teasing her with "so many silly questions," she perhaps suspends her work,
and, after a moment's perplexing thought, she says the vapor of the water
from the rivers and seas and damp ground rises into the air, and there at
last congeals into flakes of snow, and these fall through the air to the
ground.

The boy listens and attempts to understand the explanation, but he is
bewildered and lost in the endeavor to take in at once this extended
and complicated process--one which is, moreover, not only extended and
complicated, but which is composed of elements all of which are entirely
new to him.

If the mother, however, should act on the principle of communicating as
small a portion of the information required as it is possible to give
in one answer, Johnny's inquiry would lead, probably, to a conversation
somewhat like the following, the answers on the part of the mother being so
short and simple as to require no perceptible thought on her part, and
so occasioning no serious interruption to her work, unless it should be
something requiring special attention.

"Mother," asks Johnny, "what makes it snow?"

"It is the snow-flakes coming down out