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 frontier settlement, the high-perched mining-camp," who, distant indeed from school kindergartens and their equipment, might wish help in making out of what materials they have well-equipped home kindergartens.
"Come, let us play with the children," the apostles of Froebel teach us. And, "Come, let us ask the grown-ups to play with us," they would seem unconsciously to instruct the children.
One autumn a friend of mine, the mother of a three-year-old boy and of a daughter aged sixteen, said to me: "This is my daughter's first term in the high school; she will need my help. My boy is just at the age when it takes all the spare time I have to keep him out of mischief; how shall I manage?"
"Send the boy to kindergarten," I advised. "He is ready to go; and it will be good for him. He will bring some of the 'occupations' home with him; and they will keep him out of mischief for you."
She sent the boy to a little kindergarten in the neighborhood.
About two months later, I said to her, "I suppose the kindergarten has solved the problem of more spare time for your daughter's new demands upon you?"