Another friend of mine, the mother of a little girl, has had a different problem, centring around the necessity of books for children, to solve. She, too, lives in the country, and her little girl is a pupil at the neighboring district school. During a visit in the city home of a cousin the small girl had been a spectator at the city child's "school play," which happened to consist of scenes from "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." When she returned home, she wished to have such an entertainment in her school. "Dearest," her mother said, "we have no books of plays children could act." "Couldn't we do the one they did at Cousin Rose's school?" was the next query. "Papa says we have _that_." "I am afraid not," her mother demurred. "Ask your teacher." The child approached her teacher on the subject. "No," the teacher said decisively. "'A Midsummer-Night's Dream' is too long and too hard. Read it, and you'll see. But," she sagely added, "if you can find anything that is suitable, and can persuade the other children to act in it, I will help you all I can." That evening, at home, the little girl read "A Midsummer-Night's Dream." "Mamma," she suddenly cried, as she neared the end, "my teacher says this is too long and too hard for us children to do. But we _could_ do the play that the people _in it_ do--don't you think? It is _very_ short, and all the children will like it because it is about poor Pyramus and Thisbe, that we have all read about in school. It isn't _just_ the same as the way it was in the story we read; but it is about them--and the wall, and the lion, and everything! Don't you think we could do it? They did the fairy part when I saw it at Cousin Rose's school, and not this at all. But couldn't _we_?" "I did not like to discourage her," my friend said when she related the tale to me. "_All_ the other children were willing and eager to do it, so her teacher couldn't refuse, after what she had said, to help them. I helped with the rehearsals, too, and I doubt if the teacher or I ever laughed so much in all our lives as we did at that time--when there were no children about! The children were so sweet and serious over their play! They acted it as they would have acted a play on the subject of Pyramus and Thisbe written especially for them. _They_ weren't funny. No; they were perfectly lovely. What was so irresistibly comic, of course, was the difference between their performance and one's remembrance of regular performances of it--to say nothing of one's thoughts as to what Shakespeare would have said about it. How those children will laugh when they are grown up! They will have something to laugh at that will last them a lifetime. But _poor_ Shakespeare!" I did not echo these final words of my friend. For does not Shakespeare rather particularly like to bless us with the laugh that lasts a lifetime, even if--perhaps especially if--it be at our own expense?