the motto and commentary Froebel apprizes us that the mother should teach her child to weave into a whole the fragments of his experience, and thus, alternating the excursive with the collected state. of the soul, live at home with himself. Finally, since the state of inner collectedness is the state of devotion, and all feeling of the wholeness of life rises into communion with the source of life, the soul at home in itself is at home with God. In such wise do our song, picture and commentary repeat the prophecy of Nature, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests," and disclose to us its fulfillment in the promise of a final home for the soul, "In my Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you."

Were I writing to any one but you I should expect an answering letter which would remind me that thoughts such as these are for grown people and not for little children. To such a letter I should in turn reply that the Mother-Play is a mother's, or, better still, a parent's book. That it is also a child's book, and the sweetest of all books. for children, I devoutly believe, and, as I have said again and again, its chief merit is that it finds in typical concrete experiences points of contact for

the evolution of ideals in the young child, in his older brothers and sisters, in his father and mother. May not Harold see himself in the forth-flying, home-coming pigeons, and as he listens to their cooing may not the suggestion that they are telling each other where they have been stir in his little heart the desire to tell you what he has seen and done while absent from you? May not Robert and James, Edith and Mary, watching you win Harold to confidence by the example of the pigeons, feel in themselves a stronger impulse to open to you their hearts and minds? Would not your eldest born write you with greater frankness of his college life and his vacation journeys had he at Harold's age formed that habit of tender intimacy which through Froebel you are learning to create in your baby? Is not your own study of the Pigeon House helping you to be at once more courageous and more sympathetic; teaching you that "to make room for wandering is it that the world was made so wide"; convincing you that you must restrict your children to no temporal or provincial life, and yet that while educating them for the citizenship of the world and the inheritance of the ages, you must keep them true to the "kindred points of heaven and

home"? Are you not growing to understand that the human soul can dwell permanently in no spiritual home save one of its own building? Are you not making it your conscious aim to so illuminate the minds of your sons and daughters with the eternal principles of spiritual architecture that you may securely hope they will hereafter fit the separate stones of experience they quarry from life into noble temples of the soul? And one question more are you not realizing with an ever-increasing clearness that just because of that eternal procession of the divine thought we call the universe God himself dwells in an eternal home? Answering these questions to your own heart you will comprehend how a really typical fact appeals to minds in all stages of development and will recognize with fresh amazement Froebel's daringly original conception of ministering to what is deepest in the mature soul through that which appeals most sympathetically to the childish heart and imagina

tion.

If you carry out the plan mentioned in your last letter, and really organize a mother's club for the study of Froebel's mottoes, songs, and commentaries, I hope that your very first meeting may be

devoted to the Pigeon House, and that you will strive to stir in the mind of every mother present the conscious ideal of seeking heart intimacy with her children. Your letters show that you mourn the lack of that unabashed and yearning confidence which is the pledge of filial dependence. Your experience is, unfortunately, not an exceptional one. The ordinary American family is not a family in any true sense of the word, but a mere assemblage of isolated and independent units under the shelter of a single roof. Parents do not know their children, children do not know their parents, and brothers and sisters are strangers to each other's tastes, pleasures, hopes, and disappointments. This crying defect in our domestic life can be overcome only by a clearer conception of the affections, sympathies, and duties arising out of parental, filial, and fraternal relationships. Surely the solitary are not set in families in order that they may remain in solitude!

From the animal as revealer of life and its relationships Froebel passes first to the mastery of the animal by force, and second to its mastery through domestication. Whatever we may think of the Shadow Songs, we must recognize that they deal