ight
dandle one of these interesting objects without degradation!"

In such an hour I suddenly said, "Josephus, will you be the father
this time?" and without giving him a second to think, we began our
familiar lullaby. The radical nature, the full enormity, of the
proposition did not (in that moment of sweet expansion) strike
Josephus. He moved towards the cradle, seated himself in the chair,
put his foot upon the rocker, and rocked the baby soberly, while my
heart sang in triumph. After this the fathers as well as the mothers
took part in all family games, and this mighty and much-needed reform
had been worked through the magic of a fascinating plaything.

WHAT SHALL CHILDREN READ?

"What we make children love and desire is more important than what we
make them learn."

When I was a little girl (oh, six most charming words!)--it is not
necessary to name the year, but it was so long ago that children were
still reminded that they should be seen and not heard, and also that
they could eat what was set before them or go without (two maxims
that suggest a hoary antiquity of time not easily measured by the
senses),--when I was a little girl, I had the great good fortune to
live in a country village.

I believe I always had a taste for books; but I will pass over that
early period when I manifested it by carrying them to my mouth, and
endeavored to assimilate their contents by the cramming process;
and also that later stage, which heralded the dawn of the critical
faculty, perhaps, when I tore them in bits and held up the tattered
fragments with shouts of derisive laughter. Unlike the critic, no more
were given me to mar; but, like the critic, I had marred a good many
ere my vandal hand was stayed.

As soon as I could read, I had free access to an excellent medical
library, the gloom of which was brightened by a few shelves of
theological works, bequeathed to the family by some orthodox ancestor,
and tempered by a volume or two of Blackstone; but outside of these,
which were emphatically not the stuff my dreams were made of, I can
only remember a certain little walnut bookcase hanging on the wall of
the family sitting-room.

It had but three shelves, yet all the mysteries of love and life and
death were in the score of well-worn volumes that stood there side
by side; and we turned to them, year after year, with undiminished
interest. The number never seemed small, the stories never grew tame:
when we came