Swing, swong! sure and slow
Goes the pendulum to and fro.
"Tick! tock! tick! tock!

In the morning says the clock.
"Time to wake from slumber sweet,
Time to wash and time to eat.

Tick! tock." Hear the clock,
"Tick, tack, tock!" it cries,
"Children, it is time to rise!"

EMILY HUNTINGTON MILLER.

Ir was in the Eads kindergarten, one bright morning many years ago, that there came to me my first genuine insight into Froebel's Play of the Clock. At that time Mrs. Hubbard was director of the kindergarten, and her manner of playing Froebel's games always helped me to interpret them. I used to watch her very closely, for it occurred to me that from her intuitions might be deduced general principles which would be helpful to all kindergartners. She had so disciplined her body by suitable exercises that it was the pliant instrument of her will. Her voice and manner were quiet, and her whole personality suggested repose in the midst of energy. Her gestures were never vague and unmeaning, but really definitions of thought through movement. She never allowed a number of children to stand idle on the circle while a few played in the center, but invariably found some way of en

listing the activity of all in each game. Thus, if five or six children were flying birds, those on the circle became trees; if the few were butterflies, the many were flowers; if the few were fishes, the many became a flowing stream or an undulating lake. But the feature, of what for want of a better term I must call her method, which most impressed me was her complete identification of the little players with the persons or objects whose activities they imitated. Were the children, for example, playing carpenters and playing carelessly, she would never say to them "You are not planing or sawing as the carpenter does," but "I am afraid I shall have to get better carpenters to build my house." Children who failed in the rhythmic swing of the arms and legs which represented the pendulums were clocks out of order and needing repair. Tiny tots who found the flying movement difficult were consoled by the suggestion that of course baby birds couldn't fly so fast or so far as the mamma bird, but they mustn't mind, for their wings would soon be stronger. All who have watched the spontaneous play of little children know that its characteristic mark is precisely this merging of their own identity in the being of the

object represented. Thus a little girl who was playing the part of a robin mother and tenderly feeding imaginary nestlings with imaginary worms became not only pale, but breathless and palpitating with terror at her own mother's rather thoughtless suggestion of an approaching cat. Nor was her equanimity restored until she had transformed the robin into a farmer who, as she eagerly explained, was not afraid of cats.

But to return to the Clock Play. I had gone bright and early to the Eads kindergarten, for I wished to see the opening exercises, of which Froebel's game of the Tick-Tack was a daily feature. As I entered the room the children were rising to play it. A moment later a little girl followed me, and seemed about to greet the director and children when the opening strains of the Tick-Tack melody transformed her into a clock. I looked around; there were no children in the room, nothing but animated clocks-arms, legs, bodies swaying to the rhythm of the song. They were children again when the game was finished, but the spontaneous punctuality and exactness of all their work proved that they were children who had developed a clock consciousness. Then I said to myself, Froebel is

right, and to imitate the activity of any object is to become yourself the object you imitate.

In my letter on the Weathervane I tried to show you that imitation is the child's first way of getting back of phenomena to their causes, or, differently stated, his first way of explaining the world in which he finds himself. But this interpretation of environment is only one aspect of the function of imitation, and I want you now to consider its other aspect and to realize that it is by and through imitation that the child begins to create himself.

Have you ever thought how strange it is that the baby knows himself first as an object like any other, calling himself as he calls other things by a particular name, tugging to pull off his leg as he pulls off his stocking? Have you realized that it is only in contrast with a plurality of objects that he discriminates himself as I, or universal subject, and rounds into a separate mind?" Have you ever pondered the fact that each new experience teaches us something about ourselves we did not know, that every natural scene, every human relationship, every book we read, every picture we see, every song we hear, reveals to us some power or some defect in ourselves? In a story whose name I have

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