It is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special means of knowing anything: I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience. And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may observe t

Each child is an explorer in a new country—an explorer with its own special needs and curiosities. We put up iron railings to keep the explorers to our own sordidly asphalted paths. The little free wild creatures would seek their meat from God: we round them into herds, pen them in folds, and feed them with artificial foods—drab flat oil cakes all alike, not considering that for some brown nuts and red berries, and for some the new clean green grass, may be the bread of life. Or, if you take the

And you shall observe that the toys which the child loves best are always those toys which lend themselves to such symbolic use. Christmas is at hand. You go to buy gifts for the child, in memory of that Other Child whose birthday gifts were gold, frankincense, and myrrh. You go into the toyshops, elbowing your way as best you can, looking for such toys as may aid the child in his work of creative imagination. You find a vast mass and litter and jumble of incredible futilities—things made to sel

You show the child many things, all strange, all entrancing; it sees, it hears, it touches; it learns to co-ordinate sight and touch and hearing. You tell it tales of the things it cannot see and hear and touch, of men "that it may never meet, of lands that it shall never see"; strange black and brown and yellow people whose dress is not the dress of mother or nurse—strange glowing yellow lands where the sun burns like fire, and flowers grow that are not like the flowers in the fields at home. Y

A certain solidness of character, a certain quiet force and confidence grow up naturally in the man who lives all his life in one house, grows all the flowers of his life in one garden. To plant a tree and know that if you live and tend it, you will gather fruit from it; that if you set out a thorn-hedge, it will be a fine thing when your little son has grown to be a man—these are pleasures which none but the very rich can now know. (And the rich who might enjoy these pleasures prefer to run abo

To begin with, the world is much uglier than it was. At least England is, and France, and Belgium, and Italy, and I do not suppose that Germany, so far ahead of us with airships, is far behind in the ugliness which seems to be, with the airship, the hall-mark of a really advanced nation. We are proud, and justly, of the enormous advances made in the last sixty years in education, sanitation, and all the complicated and heavy machinery of the other 'ations, the 'ologies, and the 'isms; but in the

"I am going to build a palace," says the child. Or a tower or a church. And, the highest hopes inspiring him, he sets out on the new adventure. But he does not build a palace or a church, or even a railway station. What he builds is a factory, or a wall, or, in the case of the terra-cotta bricks, a portion of a French gentleman's country villa—the kind you see dozens of along the railway between Paris and Versailles. And however strong the child's desire that what he shall build shall be a palac

And the standard of expediency is not a good one for this purpose, nor is the standard of custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or the standard of success in life. Children are not good judges of expediency. The law of mere custom will not be strong enough to bind them when desire calls with enchanting voice to forbidden things. Gentility and the gospel of getting on will leave them cold. You may at first deal merely with a succession of unrelated particulars, saying, "This is right," "This

Life, we know, will teach him, in her rough, hard school, that he is only the centre of his own universe in that sense in which the same is true of us all—that far from being the prime object of the world which surrounds him, he himself counts for little or nothing, except to those who love him—and that the consideration he receives will not be, as was the consideration lavished on him in his childhood, free, ungrudging, and invariable, but will be conditioned by the services he renders to other

The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and mines and pot banks—coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron advertisements that scar the fields of earth—all the torn paper and straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root spring p

A sharp distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply everything, in the former it supplements or corrects the suggestion of the toy. But in both, as in every movement and desire of the natural child, it is imagination which tints the picture and makes the whole enterprise worth while. In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and still more in its sister "I spy," a little live streak of fear brought down from who knows

The devotion of aunts has often stirred my admiration. The heroism of aunts deserves an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place to write that epic. Give me leave, however, to say that of all the heroic acts of the devoted aunt, none seems to me more magnificent than the self-sacrifice which nerves those delightful ladies to settle themselves down to play, in cold blood, with their nephews and nieces games bought at a shop, games in boxes. I am not talking of croquet, or even badminton, thou

Having chosen your site and blocked out the mass of your buildings, you begin to collect the building material. For my own part I see the city I am going to build in the eye of the mind—or of the heart—so vividly and consistently that I never need to make notes of it on paper. I know when what I am building is not in accord with the vision, and then I pull it down. Truly in accord it never really is, but it approximates. Now when you have seen the silhouette of your city and begin to look for st

Children love to build. I still think with fond affection, and I am afraid speak with tiresome repetition, of those big oak bricks which we had when we were children. They disappeared when we left the old London house where I was born. It was in Kennington, that house—and it had a big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lilies and flags in the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that smelt lik

In the drawing-room you will find silver candlesticks and a silver inkstand. The candlesticks are like pillars. Put the inkstand across the pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled splendour. If there be a silver-backed blotting-book, take it. It will make the great door of your greatest temple. Silver bowls should not be passed by, nor bronzes. A vase of Japanese bronze set up between two ebony elephants crowns a flat pillared building with splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or Egyptia

Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the grass, fold them back level, cut the stem. For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or marjoram make charming little trees. Shells are extrem

There are no words to express half what I feel about the teachers in our Council Schools, their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy, their devotion. When we think of what the lives of poor children are, of the little they have of the good things of this world, the little chance they have of growing up to any better fate than that of their fathers and mothers, who do the hardest work of all and get the least pay of all those who work for money—when we think how rich people have money to thro

One of the things that is the matter with modern education is the absence of the conception of personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, character and temperament. For the matter of that it is this indifference to personality which makes the whole of our civilisation vulgar and vain. Our education treats children as though they were all cast in one mould; it treats men and women as though they, in their sphere, differed not at all one from another. You will say that it is impossible, in a great country a