Growing imbecile, you think. Very likely; but these ideas are no indication of it. They are good, solid common-sense, we think; such as our mothers and grandmothers acted upon, in the olden times, when early teaching and genuine industry were fashionable; when there were more busy bees to “improve each shining hour” of childhood; when these first years, which were then passed in “books and work and healthful play,” were a thousand times more childlike and happier than our days of modern improvement. Now, the toddling wee things are carried in the nurses’ arms to infant parties, dressed and flounced and frizzed, until every vestige of simple childhood is lost in their painfully ludicrous efforts to imitate their more foolish elders,--kept up far beyond a healthful bedtime, and fed with food injurious even to mature stomachs, but ruinous to a child’s digestion. Ah, dear little woman! will it be a harder task, requiring more skill and patience, to take your little girl on your lap, ten or fifteen minutes every day, and show her how to hold and use the needle; taking the warm, soft, innocent little hands, with loving caresses, into yours, and guiding the tiny fingers, until at last she learns to put the needle through the cloth, at proper distances, unaided; will this be harder or more tiresome than to dress and worry over your little one till she is drilled in dancing, taught to bow and curtesy, and gracefully accept her baby partner’s hand in the dance? Will it give you no pain to see the first development of envy, jealousy, and ill temper forced into active growth under such training? Compare this toil and responsibility with the soft and loving prattle of your little girl, as she nestles in your lap, and, with merry laugh, watches the bright needle go to and fro; and when at last she masters one stitch, and you pronounce it _well done_, will not her shout of triumph repay the teacher’s trouble? Will it any longer be a work to dread? On the contrary, will you not look forward to that daily lesson as the sweetest duty of the day? “All this sounds very pretty; but when we come to the reality,--the big stitches, the long stitches, the puckers and gathers, the mistakes and vexatious carelessness,--how many yards of cloth will be wasted before one inch of decent sewing can be accomplished by a little child?”