In her system of education, recreation played a very important part—in the first place for its hygienic value. “Let the children run about in the open air as much as possible,” she is always preaching to her nuns, “nothing will help them so much to grow tall and strong.” But, more important still, at no time more frequently than during recreation does a girl get an opportunity of sacrificing her own inclinations in order to give pleasure to others—and this is a lesson no woman can learn too early for her own happiness, if for nothing else. Moreover, proficiency in games of skill was important from a social point of view. Everybody—from the Royal Family down—played those games, and a girl would feel herself at a disadvantage afterwards if she had not attained some proficiency in them. Games like “I love my love” had, according to Madame de Maintenon, the combined merits of making a girl quick-witted, and giving her subject for reflection. It seems to me that Madame de Maintenon showed an even greater amount of commonsense than usual in the answer she gave a nun, who wished to know whether she approved of the little ones making rag-dolls at recreation, in the two-fold design of making them handy and amusing them. “Anything is better than keeping them unoccupied,” is her reply; “but you will succeed better in making them handy, by employing them at something genuinely useful. Little girls,” continues this keen student of girl nature, “usually love to be working, and you cannot make them happier than by giving them something useful to do. Show them how to do this right, and you are not only amusing them, but training them.” I wish every mother would take that lesson to heart. A little girl of three or four usually develops all of a sudden a great taste for sweeping, and baking, and washing (washing, particularly). Now, instead of sending her out to play, a wise mother will seize the opportunity of showing the little one how to do these things right. I saw the prettiest sight the other day; it was a laundry lesson to a tiny girl of three-and-a-half. You never saw such a happy little girl as the pupil; no game ever invented could hold half the interest for her, and I am bound to say that she displayed more aptitude than many a poor girl who came to the work after her ’teens. For my part, I am convinced that sewing, and sweeping, and washing, are far better instruments for hand-and-eye training than paper-folding, and mixing and modelling dough into cakes and scones, while quite as interesting to children as modelling in clay, has the educational advantage which anything woven into the genuine web of life has over what is extraneous to it. And here I may be allowed to remark that much of the educational unrest, so keenly diagnosed by Dr. Starkie, is due to the fact that parents, the first and natural teachers, have in these days a tendency to turn over their children, body and soul to a professional class—shirking their own duties.