IN the first place, I took a walk. It was a March day, but I wore a sun hat and carried a sun umbrella. Crossing the road in front of my cottage, I went through a little gate, ran down a hill under great spreading pines, and walked along the shore of a lovely lake, stopping now and then to pick white violets, and whortleberry blossoms with which to adorn my hat. Then I sat me down in a rustic seat, and read a letter from some friends in Ohio, telling about a snow storm, and a wind storm, and a frost frolic, and I know not what not of sulky, boisterous weather. Over my head, meanwhile, the mocking birds sang merrily, now pretending that they were robins, now bobolinks, and now nothing but common chirping birds! Yes, I was in a different country; and you are guessing rightly, that it was in sunny Florida. But it was time to go on; the great tabernacle bell was ringing, and I wanted to be in at the opening, for we were promised some curious sights that day. After all, I was late; some friends who had been in the woods stopped to show me some pitcher plants, and to divide great sprays of sweet-scented Southern jessamine with me, and when I tiptoed into the tabernacle, work had commenced. Certainly the sight was curious enough. Men and women, some of them gray-headed and spectacled, each of them with a bit of paper in hand about four inches square; red, or yellow, or blue, or golden, as the case might be; all the colors of the rainbow seemed to be there. Each of these grave men and women were bent over their papers, carefully folding, and creasing, and re-folding, according to the direction of the leader, until they had each made what a small woman of six, sitting near me, called "a little birdie with wings!" but what her gray-haired aunt sitting beside her, pronounced to be a "strictly correct geometrical figure." "Geometry," was that the subject? Well, that is for grown people, surely. No, playing at boat and bird building. Was that the subject? But that is for _children_. Well, you are both right; it _was_ Geometry, and it was _play_. And the name of it is Kindergarten.