Well, the only way I know about you boys and girls, whom I have never seen, is by watching very carefully the ones I do see. You children who live in New York, say, have never seen the children who live in California; yet you feel sure that they have eyes and ears just as you have, do you not? And you are pretty confident that most of them like to play far better than they like to work; that sometimes they are good-natured, and that again they are quarrelsome; and that in many ways they are like the boys and girls who live near you. In just the same way I am able to guess that you children whom I do not know are more or less like the ones I do know. Now, among these children only a few, as I have said before, seem to have the full use of their eyes. This troubles me, because the evil is one that grows greater as the children grow older. Perhaps you know that if you stop using any part of your body, that part soon begins to lose its power of doing the things it was meant to do. If you should not use your legs for a long time, they would grow so weak that they could hardly carry you. It would be much as if you had no legs, or at least as if you had legs that could not do the work they were meant to do. If you stopped using your hands, you would find your fingers growing stiffer and stiffer, so that at last they could not take a good hold of things. And if your eyes are not used for seeing clearly the things before them, they will grow less and less able to see clearly. [Illustration: Decoration] A COUNTRY ROAD I have taken a walk along a country road which was bright with flowers of many kinds, where lovely-colored butterflies and buzzing bees were hard at work hunting for sweet stuff, where birds were singing in the trees as they watched their nests, where a rabbit would dart from the bushes close by, and a squirrel would scold at me from overhead,—where, in short, there was so much to look at and delight in, that I could hardly make up my mind to keep on to my journey’s end, instead of stopping to see if I knew the names of all the flowers, to admire the queer, bright-colored little patterns on the wing of the butterfly which was resting on a neighboring blossom, and to find out what sort of eggs were in the nest that I knew must be near at hand, for the mother bird let out her secret by her frightened clucking. Well, I have taken just such a walk; and on going into the house I have felt as if I were obliged to put aside a book of enchanting fairy stories, or rather as if I were turning my back on fairyland itself, with all its wonderful sights and sounds and adventures. And then what has happened? Why, some child (it has not always been a child) has come in, and I have said, “Was not that a fine walk? What did you see along that lovely road?”