e beauty. And animals? The child plays with cat and dog, he
feeds the chickens, the horse and the donkey, he watches with the utmost
interest caterpillar, snail and spider, but he does not want to be asked
questions about them--he does want to talk and perhaps to ask the
questions himself--nor does he always want even to draw, paint or model
them. Mostly he wants to watch, and perhaps just to stir them up a
little if they do not perform to his satisfaction. He does not
necessarily mean to tease, only why should he watch an animal that does
nothing? "The animals haven't any habits when I watch them," a little
girl once said to Professor Arthur Thomson.

All children should live in the country at least for part of the year.
They should know fields and gardens, and have intercourse with hens and
chickens, cows and calves, sheep and lambs; should make hay and see the
corn cut. They would still want the wisely sympathetic teacher, not to
arouse interest--that is not necessary, but to keep it alive by keeping
pace with the child's natural development. It is not merely living in
the country that develops the little child's interest in shape and
colour and scent into something deeper. People still "spend all their
time in the fields and forests and see and feel nothing of the beauties
of Nature, and of their influence on the human heart"; and this, said
Froebel--and it is just what Mr. Clutton Brock is saying now--is because
the child "fails to find the same feelings among adults." Two effects
follow: the child feels the want of sympathy and loses some respect for
the elder, and also he loses his original joy in Nature.

"There is in every human being the passionate desire for this
self-forgetfulness--to which it attains when it is aware of beauty--and
a passionate delight in it when it comes. The child feels that delight
among spring flowers; we can all remember how we felt it in the first
apprehension of some new beauty of the universe, when we ceased to be
little animals and became aware that there was this beauty outside us to
be loved. And most of us must remember, too, the strange indifference of
our elders. They were not considering the lilies of the field; they did
not want us to get our feet wet among them. We might be forgetting
ourselves, but they were remembering us; and we became suddenly aware of
the bitterness of life and the tyranny of facts. Now parents and nurses
(and teachers) have, of course, to remember chi