and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.

"She understands, _now_, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one
way and white the other!" the mother observed.

"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some
curiosity.

"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time.
She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the
spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is
made of, and how it is made!"

It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future
than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents
of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me,
however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of
any other era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one
might designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I
have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy,
but how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn
not alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope
to become a member of a particular department of it.

We occasionally hear elderly persons exclaim that children of the
present day are taught a great many things that did not enter into the
education of their grandparents, or even of their parents. But, on
investigation, we scarcely find that this is the case. What we discover
is that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old
lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer
make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross-
stitch"; they learn to do cross-stitch letters, only they learn not by
working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to
"learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a
"guest towel," which later serves as a Christmas or a birthday gift of
the most satisfactory kind! Perhaps one of the best things we do for the
little girls of our families is to teach them to take their first
stitches to some definite end. Certainly we do it with as conscientious
a care as ever watched over the stitches of the little girls of old as
they made the faded samplers we cherish so affectionately.

The brothers of these little girls learned carpentry, when they were old
enough to handle tools with safety. The boys of to-day also learn it;
some of them begin lo