aw of violence is replaced by the law of
love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or
three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June,
that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit
to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little
fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumnae of the Normal
college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established
and maintained the school. Johnny was a sweet little fellow, one of eight
children from a wretched tenement home down the street into which the
kindergartner had found her way. The youngest of the eight was a baby that
was getting so big and heavy that it half killed the mother to drag it
around when she went out working, and the father, with a consideration for
her that was generously tempered with laziness, was considering the
advisability of staying home to take care of it himself, "so as to give
her a show." There was a refinement of look and manner, if not of dress,
about little Johnny after he was washed clean, that made the tenement
setting seem entirely too plebeian for him, and his rescuers had high
hopes of his future. I regret to say that I saw the pet, before I left,
deliberately knock the smallest baby in the school down, and when he was
banished from the ring in consequence and condemned to take his howling
playmate over in the corner and show her pictures until he repented, take
an unworthy revenge by pinching her surreptitiously until she howled
louder. Worse than that, when the baby had finally been comforted with a
headless but squeaking toy sheep, he secretly pulled the insides and the
ba-a out of the lambkin through its broken neck, when no one was looking.
I was told that Johnny was believed to have the making of a diplomat in
his little five-year-old body, and I think it very likely--of a politician
anyway.

While this was going on, another boy, twice as large as Johnny, had been
temporarily exiled from the ring for clumsiness. It was even more
hopelessly constitutional, to all appearances, than Johnny's Machiavelian
cunning. In the game he had persistently stumbled over his own feet. Made
to take a seat at the long table, he fell off his chair twice in one
minute from sheer embarrassment. In luminous contrast to his awkwardness
was the desperate agility of a little Irishman I had just left in another
kindergarten. Each time he