My visitor at once collected her toys and prepared to go. At the door
she turned. "Good-bye," she said, again dropping her prim courtesy. "I
have had a very pleasant time."

"So have I!" I exclaimed.

And I had had. "She was so entertaining," I said to my nurse, "and her
game was so interesting!"

"It is not an uncommon game," my nurse remarked, with a smile; "and she
is just an ordinary, nice child!"

America is full of ordinary, nice children who beguile their elders into
playing with them games that are not uncommon. How much "pleasant time"
is thereby spent!

"Where do American children learn to expect grown people to play with
them?" an Englishwoman once asked me. "In the kindergarten?"

Undoubtedly they do. In no country except Germany is the kindergarten so
integral a part of the national life as it is in America. In our cities,
rich and poor alike send their children to kindergartens. Not only in
the public and the private schools, but also in the social settlements,
and even in the Sunday-schools, we have kindergarten departments. In the
rural schools the teachers train the little "beginners" in accordance
with kindergarten principles. Even to places far away from any schools
at all the kindergarten penetrates. Only yesterday I saw a book, written
by a kindergartner, dedicated to "mothers on the rolling prairie, the
far-off rancho, the rocky island, in the lonely light-house, the