e all along been eager to teach these foreign children.
We have no place to teach them in, except our church. It was rather a
wrench for my husband and me,--giving our approval to using a church for
a club-house. But we did it. And we secured the consent of the rest of
the congregation,--we told them what our children had said. We were not
the only ones who thought the children had, to use an old-fashioned
theological term, 'been directed' in what they had said!" she concluded.

The children had said nothing that the minister had not said. Was it not
less what they had said than the fact of their saying it that changed
the whole course of feeling and action in that parish?

On the days when it is our lot to share in doing large tasks, the
children help us. What of the days which bring with them only a "petty
round of irritating concerns and duties?" Do they not help us then, too?

In a house on my square, there lives a little girl, three years old,
who, every morning at about eight o'clock, when the front doors of the
square open, and the workers come hurrying down their steps, appears at
her nursery window,--open except in very stormy weather. "Good-bye!" she
calls to each one, smiling, and waving her small hand, "good-bye!"

"Good-bye!" we all call back, "good-bye!" We smile, too, and wave a hand
to the little girl. Then, almost invariably, we glance at each other,
and smile again, together. Thus our day begins.

We are familiar with the thought of our devotion to children. As
individuals, and as a nation, our services to the children of our land
are conspicuously great. "You do so much for children, in America!" It
is no new thing to us to hear this exclamation. We have heard, we hear
it so often! All of us know that it is true. We are coming to see that
the converse is equally true; that the children do much for us, do more
than we do for them; do the best thing in the world,--make us who are so
many, one; keep us, who are so diverse, united; help us, whether our
tasks be great or small, to "go to our labor, smiling."

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN CHILD***

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