No thorough study of Chinese child life can be made until the wall of Chinese exclusiveness is broken down and the homes of the East are thrown open to the people of the West. Glimpses of that life however, are available, sufficient in number and character to give a fairly good idea of what it must be. The playground is by no means always hidden, least of all when it is the street. The Chinese nurse brings her Chinese rhymes, stories and games into the foreigner's home for the amusement of its l

It is a mistake to suppose that any one nation or people has exclusive right to Mother Goose. She is an omnipresent old lady. She is Asiatic as well as European or American. Wherever there are mothers, grandmothers, and nurses there are Mother Gooses,—or; shall we say, Mother Geese—for I am at a loss as to how to pluralize this old dame. She is in India, whence I have rhymes from her, of which the following is a sample: Heh, my baby! Ho, my baby! See the wild, ripe plum, And if you'd like to eat

Before going to China, I could not but wonder, when I saw a Chinese or Japanese doll, why it was they made such unnatural looking things for babies to play with. On reaching the Orient the whole matter was explained by my first sight of a baby. The doll looks like the child! Nothing in China is more common than babies. Nothing more helpless. Nothing more troublesome. Nothing more attractive. Nothing more interesting. A Chinese baby is a round-faced little helpless human animal, whose eyes look l

Children's games are always interesting. Chinese games are especially so because they are a mine hitherto unexplored. An eminent archdeacon once wrote: "The Chinese are not much given to athletic exercises." A well-known doctor of divinity states that, "their sports do not require much physical exertion, nor do they often pair off, or choose sides and compete, in order to see who are the best players," while a still more prominent writer tells us that, "active, manly sports are not popular in th

After having made the collection of boys' games we undertook to obtain in a similar way, fullest information concerning games played by the girls. Of course, it was impossible to do it alone, for the appearance of a man among a crowd of little girls in China is similar to that of a hawk among a flock of small chicks—it results in a tittering and scattering in every direction, or a gathering together in a dock under the shelter of the school roof or the wings of the teacher. One of the teachers,

One day while sitting at table, with our little girl, nineteen months old, on her mother's knee near by, we picked up her rubber doll and began to whip it violently. The child first looked frightened, then severe, then burst into tears and plead with her mother not to "let papa whip dolly." Few people realize how much toys become a part of the life of the children who play with them. They are often looked upon as nothing more than "playthings for children." This is a very narrow view of their us

It was on a bright spring afternoon that a Chinese official and his little boy called at our home on Filial Piety Lane, in Peking. The dresses of father and child were exactly alike—as though they had been twins, boots of black velvet or satin, blue silk trousers, a long blue silk garment, a waistcoat of blue brocade, and a black satin skullcap—the child was in every respect, even to the dignity of his bearing, a vest-pocket edition of his father. He had a T'ao of books which I recognized as the

My little girl came running into my study greatly excited and exclaiming: "Papa, the monkey show, the monkey show. We want the monkey show, may we have it?" Now if you had but one little girl, and she wanted a monkey show to come into your own court and perform for her and her little friends for half an hour, the cost of which was the modest sum of five cents, what would you do? You would do as I did, no doubt, go out with the little girl, call in the passing showman and allow him to perform, wh

"How is that?" "Very good." "Can you do it?" asked the sleight-of-hand performer, as he rolled a little red ball between his finger and thumb, pitched it up, caught it as it came down, half closed his hand and blew into it, opened his hand and the ball had disappeared. He picked up another ball, tossed it up, caught it in his mouth, dropped it into his hand, and it mysteriously disappeared. The juggler was seated on the ground with a piece of blue cloth spread out before him, on which were three

One hot summer afternoon as I lay in the hammock trying to take a nap after a hard forenoon's work and a hearty lunch, I heard the same old nurse who had told me my first Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes, telling the following story to the same little boy to whom she had repeated the "Mouse and the Candlestick." She told him that the Chinese call the Milky Way the Heavenly River, and that the Spinning Girl referred to in the story is none other than the beautiful big star in Lyra which we call Vega,