Only last summer I repeated this poem to a little girl whose home was a farm not far from a house at which I was stopping.
"But," she said, in a puzzled tone of voice, "no place is as big as the country! Look!" she exclaimed, pointing to the distant horizon; "it's so big it touches the edge of the sky! No city is that big, is it?"
IV
THE CHILD IN SCHOOL
An elderly woman was talking to me not long ago about her childhood.
"No, my dear, I did not have a governess," she said, in answer to my questionings. "Neither did I attend the public schools, though I lived in the city. I went to a private school. The pupils in it were the girls of the little social circle to which my parents belonged. There were perhaps twenty of us in all. And there were three teachers; one for the 'first class,' one for the 'second class,' and a French-German-music- and-drawing-teacher-in-one for both classes."
"And what did you study?" I asked.
"Besides French, German, music, and drawing?" my elderly friend mused. "Well, we had the three R's; and history, English and American, and geography, and deportment. I think that was all."
"And you liked it?" I ventured.
"Yes, my dear, I did," replied my friend, "though I used to pretend that I didn't. I sometimes even 'played sick' in order to be allowed to stay home from school. Children then, as now, thought they ought to 'hate to go to school.' I believe most of them did, too. I happened to be a 'smart' child; so I liked school. I suppose 'smart' children still do."