ants, as
taught there. One of the excellent features of the system is the "kitchen
garden," for the little ones, a kind of play housekeeping that covers the
whole range of house-work, and the cooking class for the larger girls that
gives many of them a taste for housekeeping which helps to overcome their
prejudice against domestic service, and so to solve one of the most
perplexing questions of the day--no less serious to the children of the
poor than to the wives of the rich, if they only knew or would believe it.
It is the custom of the wise teachers, when the class has become
proficient, to invite the mothers to a luncheon gotten up by their
children. "I never," reports the teacher of the Eighteenth Ward Industrial
School after such a session, "saw women so thoroughly interested." And it
was not only the mother who was thus won over in the pride over her
daughter's achievement. It was the home itself that was invaded with
influences that had been strangers to it heretofore. For the mother
learned something she would not be apt to forget, by seeing her child do
intelligently and economically what she had herself done ignorantly and
wastefully before. Poverty and waste go always hand in hand. The girls are
taught, with the doing of a thing, enough also of the chemistry of cooking
to enable them to understand the "why" of it. The influence of that sort
of teaching in the tenement of the poor no man can measure. I am well
persuaded that half of the drunkenness that makes so many homes miserable
is at least encouraged, if not directly caused, by the mismanagement and
bad cooking at home. All the wife and mother knows about housekeeping she
has picked up in the tenement since she was married, among those who
never knew how to cook a decent meal or set a clean table; while the
saloonkeeper hires the best cook he can get for money, and serves his hot
lunch free to her husband in a tidy and cheerful room, where no tired
women--tired of the trials and squabbles of the day--no cross looks, and
no dirty, fighting children come to spoil his appetite and his hour of
rest.

Here, as everywhere, it is the personal influence of the teacher that
counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home,
and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the
way of trouble and sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred
ways. "Sometimes," says one of the teachers, who has seen the children of
he