girls are chiefly employed by the rich Jews, and you certainly need to
be as rich as a Jew to pay their laundry bills. The young children of
the poor are provided for in Berlin, as they are in other cities, by
creches, where the working mother can leave them for the day. Several
of these institutions are open to the public at certain times, and
those I have seen were well kept and well arranged.

The women of Germany have not thrown away their knitting needles yet,
though they no longer take them to the concert or the play as they did
in a less sophisticated age. Children still learn to knit either at
school or at home, and if their mother teaches them she probably makes
them a marvellous ball. She does this by winding the wool round little
toys and small coins, until it hides as many surprises as a Christmas
stocking, and is as much out of shape; but the child who wants the
treasures in the stocking has to knit for them, and the faster she
secures them the faster she is learning her lesson. The mother,
however, who troubles about knitting is not quite abreast of her
times. The truly modern woman flies at higher game; with the solemnity
and devotion of a Mrs. Cimabue Brown she cherishes in her children a
love of Art. Her watchword is _Die Kunst im Leben des Kindes_, or Art
in the Nursery, and she is assisted by men who are doing for German
children of this generation what Walter Crane and others did for
English nurseries twenty-five years ago. You can get enchanting
nursery pictures, toys, and decorations in Germany to-day, and each
big city has its own school of artists who produce them: friezes where
the birds and beasts beloved of children solemnly pursue each other;
grotesque wooden manikins painted in motley; mysterious landscapes
where the fairy-tales of the world might any day come true. Dream
pictures these are of snow and moonlight, marsh and forest, the real
Germany lying everywhere outside the cities for those who have eyes to
see. Even the toy department in an ordinary shop abounds in treasures
that never seem to reach England: queer cheap toys made of wood, and
not mechanical. It must be a dull child who is content with a
mechanical toy, and it is consoling to observe that most children
break the mechanism as quickly as possible and then play sensibly with
the remains. Many of the toys known to generations of children seemed
to be as popular as ever, and quite unchanged. You still find the old
toy towns, fo