wainscot and in the shadows of the bedroom. He will come upon their
traces; they will do him little kindnesses. Their affairs should
interweave with the affairs of the child's dolls and brick castles and
toy furniture. At first the child will scarcely be in a world of
sustained stories, but very eager for anecdotes and simple short tales.

This is the hopeful foundation upon which at or about the fifth year
the formal education of every child in a really civilized community
ought to begin. [Footnote: One may note here, perhaps, the desirability
too often disregarded by over-solicitous parents, and particularly by
the parents of the solitary children who are now so common, of keeping
the child a little out of focus, letting it play by itself whenever it
will, never calling attention to it in a manner that awakens it to the
fact of an audience, never talking about it in its presence. Solitary
children commonly get too much control, they are forced and beguiled
upward rather than allowed to grow, their egotism is over-stimulated,
and they miss many of the benefits of play and competition. It seems a
pity, too, in the case of so many well-to-do people, that having
equipped nurseries they should not put them to a fuller use--if in no
other way than by admitting foster children. None of this has been very
fully analyzed, of course (there are enormous areas of valuable
research in these matters waiting for people of intelligence and
leisure, or of intelligence and means), but the opinion that solitary
children are handicapped by their loneliness is very strong. It is
nearly certain that as a rule they make less agreeable boys and girls,
but to me at any rate it is not nearly so certain that they make adult
failures. It would be interesting to learn just what proportion of
solitary children there is on the roll of those who have become great
in our world. One thinks of John Ruskin, a particularly fine specimen
of the highly focussed single son. Prig perhaps he was, but this world