Children are entitled to their full heritage; education is paramount, culture is the saving grace. Your memory of a child is the healthy glow of the unfettered spirit. None of us want him with a book in his hand all the time. We wish him to take the freshness of life as his nature, to run with hair tossing to the wind. But glance into his eyes and you will find a craving look that a ball will not satisfy, a far-away expression that no shout from the roadside will change. It is the placid gleam of sunset after physical storm, the moment of rest after the overflow of animal energy. Children have their hero moments when they are not of the present, but are part of that perennial truth which is clearer-visioned in the past, since we have to dream of it. Kate Douglas Wiggin claims that the book is a fact to a child. It should be an idealising fact. Not long ago a crazy man died, after having drawn up a will: his world’s goods consisted of the wide, wide world; his legatees were every living soul. He said: “I leave to children, inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely, according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. And I devise to children the banks of the brooks, and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows that dip therein, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees. And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the night and the moon and the train of the milky way to wonder at.” What thinks the teacher of such riches, what the librarian with her catalogue number? A book is a fact, nay, a friend, a dream. Is there not a creed for us all in the wisdom of that crazy man? Here was one with clear vision, to whom fact was as nothing before the essential of one’s nature--a prophet, a seer, one to whom the tragedy of growing up had been no tragedy, but whose memory of childhood had produced a chastening effect upon his manhood. Are we surprised to find him adding: “I give to good fathers and mothers, in trust for their children, all good little words of praise and encouragement, and all quaint pet names and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly and generously, as the needs of their children may require.” And so, we ask, more especially the parent than the librarian, is there not excitement in the very drawing out from a child his heart’s desire? Imperative it is in all cases that book-buying should not be a lottery, but more persistently apparent does it become that a child’s _one_ individual book upon the Christmas-tree or for a birthday should not represent a grown-up’s after-thought. =Bibliographical Note= _The articles referred to in this chapter are:_ BURTON, RICHARD--Literature for Children. _No. Amer._ 167:278 (Sept., 1898).