This little girl, when she was older, desired to become a kindergartner. There was a training-school in the near-by city. She could not afford to go to and fro on the train, but there was a trolley. The journey on the trolley occupied three hours, but the girl took it twice daily for two years. "Doesn't it tire you?" I asked her. "Oh, somewhat," she admitted; "but I was already used to it. We usually traveled to town on it when I was small." "Countrified" is not the word to apply to American farmers and their families. One might as aptly employ it when describing the people of England who live on their "landed estates." Ignorance and dullness and awkwardness we shall not often find among country children. The boys and girls on the farms are as well informed, as mentally alert, and as attractive as children in any other good homes in America. We all know Mr. James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Little Cousin Jasper." The country boy in it, we recall, concluded his reflections upon the happier fortune of the boy from the "city" of Rensselaer with these words: "Wishst our town ain't like it is!-- Wishst it's ist as big as his! Wishst 'at _his_ folks they'd move _here_, An' _we'd_ move to Rensselaer!" Only last summer I repeated this poem to a little girl whose home was a farm not far from a house at which I was stopping. "But," she said, in a puzzled tone of voice, "no place is as big as the country! Look!" she exclaimed, pointing to the distant horizon; "it's so big it touches the edge of the sky! No city is _that_ big, is it?" IV THE CHILD IN SCHOOL An elderly woman was talking to me not long ago about her childhood. "No, my dear, I did not have a governess," she said, in answer to my questionings. "Neither did I attend the public schools, though I lived in the city. I went to a private school. The pupils in it were the girls of the little social circle to which my parents belonged. There were perhaps twenty of us in all. And there were three teachers; one for the 'first class,' one for the 'second class,' and a French-German-music- and-drawing-teacher-in-one for both classes." "And what did you study?" I asked. "Besides French, German, music, and drawing?" my elderly friend mused. "Well, we had the three R's; and history, English and American, and geography, and deportment. I think that was all." "And you liked it?" I ventured. "Yes, my dear, I did," replied my friend, "though I used to pretend that I didn't. I sometimes even 'played sick' in order to be allowed to stay home from school. Children then, as now, thought they ought to 'hate to go to school.' I believe most of them did, too. I happened to be a 'smart' child; so I liked school. I suppose 'smart' children still do."