She smiled. "Our minister and his wife declare that my small son and daughter are mainly responsible for it!" she said. "They began to attend the public school this autumn,--they had, up to that time, been taught at home. You know what the population of this town is,--half foreign. Even in the school in this district, there are a considerable number of foreigners. I don't know why it is, when they have so many playmates in their own set, that my children should have made friends, and such close friends, with some of those foreign children! But they did. And not content with bringing them here, they wanted to go to their homes! Of course, I couldn't allow that. I explained to my boy and girl as well as I was able; I told them those people did not know how to live properly; that they might keep their children clean, because they wouldn't be permitted to send them to school unless they did; but their houses were dirty, and their food bad. And what do you think my children said to me? They said, 'Mother, have they _got_ to have their houses dirty? Have they _got_ to have bad food? Couldn't _they_ have things nice, as _we_ have?' It quite startled me to hear my own children ask me such things; it made me think. I told my husband about it; it made him think, too. You know, we are always hearing that, if we _are_ going to try to improve the living conditions of the poor, we must 'begin with the children,'--begin by teaching them better ways of living. Our minister and his wife have all along been eager to teach these foreign children. We have no place to teach them in, except our church. It was rather a wrench for my husband and me,--giving our approval to using a church for a club-house. But we did it. And we secured the consent of the rest of the congregation,--we told them what our children had said. We were not the only ones who thought the children had, to use an old-fashioned theological term, 'been directed' in what they had said!" she concluded. The children had said nothing that the minister had not said. Was it not less what they had said than the fact of their saying it that changed the whole course of feeling and action in that parish? On the days when it is our lot to share in doing large tasks, the children help us. What of the days which bring with them only a "petty round of irritating concerns and duties?" Do they not help us then, too? In a house on my square, there lives a little girl, three years old, who, every morning at about eight o'clock, when the front doors of the square open, and the workers come hurrying down their steps, appears at her nursery window,--open except in very stormy weather. "Good-bye!" she calls to each one, smiling, and waving her small hand, "good-bye!" "Good-bye!" we all call back, "good-bye!" We smile, too, and wave a hand to the little girl. Then, almost invariably, we glance at each other, and smile again, together. Thus our day begins.