It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far- reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we should "do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as may be within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor character, we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered. "Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a scrap of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the baby of the family, "why are the threads of this cloth pink when you unravel it one way, and white when you unravel it the other?" The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to the child about the warp and the woof in weaving. "I don't _quite_ see why _that_ makes the threads pink one way and white the other," the little girl said, perplexedly, when the explanation was finished. "When you go to kindergarten, you will," I suggested. "But I want to know now," the child demurred. The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply" establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors; and had taught the little girl how to weave with them. "She understands, _now_, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one way and white the other!" the mother observed. "Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some curiosity. "Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time. She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is made of, and how it is made!" It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me, however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of any other era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one might designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy, but how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn not alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope to become a member of a particular department of it.