It may be that all children, whatever their nationalities, are like this little girl. We, in America, have a fuller opportunity to become intimately acquainted with the minds of children than have the people of any other nation of the earth. For more completely than any other people do American fathers and mothers make friends and companions of their children, asking from them, first, love; then, trust; and, last of all, the deference due them as "elders." Any child may feel as did my small neighbor about a "peculiar" father; only a child who had been his comrade as well as his child would so freely have voiced her feeling. We all remember the little boy in Stevenson's poem, "My Treasures," whose dearest treasure, a chisel, was dearest because "very few children possess such a thing." Had he been an American child, that chisel would not have been a "treasure" at all, unless all of the children possessed such a thing. Not only do the children of our Nation want what the other children of their circle have when they can use it; they want it even when they cannot use it. I have a little girl friend who, owing to an accident in her infancy, is slightly lame. Fortunately, she is not obliged to depend upon crutches; but she cannot run about, and she walks with a pathetically halting step. One autumn this child came to her mother and said: "Mamma, I'd like to go to dancing-school." "But, my dearest, I'm afraid--I don't believe--you could learn to dance --very well," her mother faltered. "Oh, mamma, _I_ couldn't learn to dance _at all_!" the little girl exclaimed, as if surprised that her mother did not fully realize this fact. "Then, dearest, why do you want to go to dancing-school?" her mother asked gently. "The other girls in my class at school are all going," the child said. Her mother was silent; and the little girl came closer and lifted pleading eyes to her face. "_Please_ let me go!" she begged. "The others are all going," she repeated. "I could not bear to refuse her," the mother wrote to me later. "I let her go. I feared that it would only make her feel her lameness the more keenly and be a source of distress to her. But it isn't; she enjoys it. She cannot even try to learn to dance; but she takes pleasure in being present and watching the others, to say nothing of wearing a 'dancing- school dress,' as they do. This morning she said to her father: 'I can't dance, Papa; but I can talk about it. I learn how at dancing-school. Oh, I love dancing-school!'" Her particular accomplishment maybe of minute value in itself; but is not her content in it a priceless good? If she can continue to enjoy learning only to talk about the pleasures her lameness will not permit her otherwise to share, her dancing-school lessons will have taught her better things than they taught "the other children," who could dance.