When Alice met the Dodo and his companions she proposed a race not a bout of Dalcrozian eurhythmics, and I do not know that she was much to be pitied. Eurhythmics are excellent things in themselves, but mothers who see in them a complete substitute for reading and racing are making a sad mistake. Every Alice, like Lewis Carroll’s heroine, lives in a dream-world which gradually fades away with the trailing “clouds of glory” into reality, but some parents seem to delight in artificially increasing the fairylike mist of unreality, or at least unworldliness, which surrounds the marvellous time of childhood. They try to keep the child in a kind of mental incubator with elaborate stained glass walls, as if the “dome of many coloured glass” under which we are all born were not enough to stain “the white radiance of eternity.” To do this, in my opinion, is unkind to little Alice. She cannot remain the sleeping beauty for ever, and the odds are that it will not be a Prince Charming who arouses her, but some ugly apparition of the everyday for which her experience has in no way prepared her. As a nation we are mightily fond of illusions, and suffer sadly from indulgence in them. We can overcome best by seeing clearly what it is that stands over against us, and dreamy Alice will be none the worse for being allowed to see a little clearly among the many happy fantasies of her days of wonderland. Old Kingsley had his cranks, but he did not wander far from the mark in his “Waterbabies.” Poor little Tom, the sweep’s lad, came up too hard against bitter realities of a certain material kind, from which his creator rescued him by handing him over to the jolly water babies in the river at the bottom of Harthover Fell. But the fairy life and the caresses of Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby could not save Tom from coming up against certain harder spiritual realities, by mastery of which alone could he become a man. His soul was saved by the uncomfortable Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, tempered by the loving care of little Effie. If you object that he had much better have became a complete fairy or a Peter Pan who never grew up, then I disagree with you, and the fairies do not agree with you either. They would prefer to have the immortal soul in the perishable body like Hans Andersen’s mermaid who gave up her tail to walk among men, though to walk was like treading on sharp knives. Good Englishwomen are such admirable mortals that it would be a thousand pities to make bad fairies of them. Some mothers of little Alices like to think of life as a long episode in the Russian ballet, all gay colour and perfect pose: they forget that Madame Karsavina works more hours in a day to attain this perfection than they do in a week to attain nothing at all. They are unaware of the surprising fact that it is possible to be more than a little ordinary and only moderately ornamental, and yet to be reasonably happy and useful. What I should like to see to-day would be more reality in