It would be most interesting and instructive to make a tour of missionary kindergartens for the purpose of seeing how ingenious our missionary teachers are, how they adapt Froebel’s ideas and methods to the most extraordinary circumstances which would have made that great educator gasp, how they must not only translate and adapt songs and tunes and games, but compose and create and invent,--all in an acquired language which has perhaps been only recently reduced to writing by some pioneer missionary. It might be pertinent to ask if all Women’s Boards provide the kindergartners and other teachers whom they send to the foreign field with a first-class outfit of all needed material, and if they remember that such an outfit needs to be replenished at least as often as a similar one does in the home land. It is not fair to require a missionary to make bricks without straw. [Sidenote: A West African kindergarten.] A visit to a West African Kindergarten will show an inventive and adaptable missionary in charge. We have a new primary Sunday-School room which will be my kindergarten. It is a low wall covered by a round thatched roof high enough to leave a good big space for air. The floor is mudded and marked in squares. It looks very nice, but I shall take pains to get the cracks filled up, for they catch too much dirt and jigger seeds. The benches are not yet made, so the children who were cleaned up for Sunday went after leaves to sit on. The classes have to go out under trees to separate, but it is a great improvement upon the dirty and dangerous saw pit where they have met for so long. The only advantage about the saw pit was the roof for shade and pieces of wood and logs to sit upon. The big folks have been getting most of the attention and all of the advantages, but we feel that the children should have most because they are in the future. They do not show such shining results at once, but work with them will lay a foundation which is greatly needed here for really effective work.... I have a box cupboard, a sand table, two long low tables marked with squares, and strong benches. I have not much kindergarten material, but I do not need more at present. My first “gift” is a basin of water. They march in singing “Good morning, kind teacher” (only I am thankful to say the Umbundu words leave out the “kind”). Then we sing another song or two, and the prayer with bowed heads. I have no music, so I have to learn the tunes myself before I come to school. The children are the dearest, cunning things and they do want to learn.[63] [Sidenote: Primitive education among backward nations.]