ng before they can handle any tools with safety,
and when they can handle no tool at all except a hammer. As soon as they
wish to drive nails, they are allowed to drive them, and taught to drive
them to some purpose. I happened not a great while ago to pass the day
at the summer camp of a friend of mine who is the mother of a small boy,
aged five. My friend's husband was constructing a rustic bench.

The little boy watched for a time; then, "Daddy, _I_ want to put in
nails," he said.

"All right," replied his father; "you may. Just wait a minute and I'll
let you have the hammer and the nails. Your mother wants some nails in
the kitchen to hang the tin things on. If she will show you where she
wants them, I'll show you how to put them in."

This was done, with much gayety on the part of us all. When the small
boy, tutored by his father, had driven in all the required nails, he
lifted a triumphant face to his mother. "There they are!" he exclaimed.
"Now let's hang the tin things on them, and see how they look!"

The boy's father did not finish the rustic bench that day. When a
neighboring camper, who stopped in to call toward the end of the
afternoon, expressed surprise at his apparent dilatoriness, and asked
for an explanation, the father simply said, "I did mean to finish it to-
day, but I had to do something for my boy instead."

One of the things we grown-ups do for children that has been rather
severely criticized is the lavishing upon them of toys,--intricate and
costly toys. "What, as a child, I used to _pretend_ the toys I had,
were, the toys my children have now, _are_!" an acquaintance of mine was
saying to me recently. "For instance," she went on, "I had a box with a
hole in one end of it; I used to pretend that it was a camera, and
pretend to take pictures with it! I cannot imagine my children doing
that! They have real cameras and take real pictures."

The camera would seem to be typical of the toys we give to the children
of to-day; they can do something with it,--something real.

The dearest treasure of my childhood was a tiny gold locket, shaped, and
even engraved, like a watch. Not long ago I was showing it to a little
girl who lives in New York. "I used to pretend it _was_ a watch," I
said; "I used to pretend telling the time by it."

She gazed at it with interested eyes. "It is very nice," she observed
politely; "but wouldn't you have liked to have a _real_ watch? _I_ have
one; and I _really_ te