The furniture is of the simplest kind. We used some tables that
we had, and bought one new one, some bentwood chairs for the
older children and others such as are used in kindergartens for
the younger. Pratt Institute lent us that first winter the very
attractive illustrations by the Misses Whitney for Louisa
Alcott's "Candy country." Some friends who were breaking up
housekeeping gave the room a case of native and foreign stuffed
birds with the hope that they might be as great a source of
pleasure to the children as they had been to them in their
childhood. Another friend sent us two trunks of curiosities from
Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, which are shown a few at
a time.
The next summer, 1905, the book-talks were about pictures in the
room, most of which had been bought with our friends' gifts.
Windsor Castle, Kenilworth, Heidelberg Castle, The Alhambra, St.
George, King Arthur, Sir Walter Scott, the Canterbury Pilgrims,
some Shakespeare stories. On the Alhambra afternoon, a girl who
had spent her first year out of college in Spain described the
palace and showed curiosities from Granada. One day a Civil War
nurse who happened in was persuaded to tell the boys and girls in
the room about the three weeks she spent in the White House,
taking care of Tad Lincoln through a fever. Some years later we
were fortunate enough to hear her again in the room above, on
Abraham Lincoln's hundredth birthday, when she held the attention
of a large number of boys and girls for more than an hour.
The next summer "What you can get out of a Henty book" was used
as an excuse for showing books and pictures about the Crusades,
Venice, the knights of Malta, the Rebellion of the Forty-five,
the East India Company, the siege of Gibraltar, the Peninsula
war, and modern Italy.
That summer we had a puzzle-club to show younger children how to
work the puzzles in St. Nicholas and other magazines and
newspapers. We held our first Christmas exhibition that year,
1906, in the room itself, for one day only, before the hour of
opening.
After an exhibition of lace in the Athenaeum the next spring, the
specialist who arranged it held the attention of her audience of
girls between ten and fourteen, giving a practical illustration
of the making of pillow-lace, showing specimens of different
kinds, pointing out the use of lace in old-fashioned costumes for
children, and exhibiting a piece of Valenciennes which had been
stolen by a catbird and recovered before it was woven into a
nest. This talk was given at my request, because we could find
almost nothing on lace in books for children, and the exhibit was
then attracting much notice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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