is lacking, but because these children are only too often driven to hide their lights, because they feel conspicuous, are teased, and rebuked, and chidden for their non-conformity, and are made to feel themselves outcasts if they pursue the way their spirit tends to lead them; and they lose their light, these finer little spirits, and subside into the twilight of mediocre minds.

It is indeed difficult, in these times of over-crowded schools and over-worked teachers, to foster and develop the personalities of these little ones, but we all look to a time when education may be a stronger force among us, more respected and more desired, when those who teach in our elementary schools may be the finest men and women we have, those of the greatest hearts, and the widest understanding (for into their hands we place the most precious thing we have); a time, when, realizing that the laborer is worthy of his hire, we must also be brought to realize that the hire must be worthy of the laborer.

We become more and more socialistic in our community life in these days, and a child is now so little left to the charge of his mother that his life, almost from babyhood upwards, is just a passing on from one trained hand to another till he is able to support himself independently, and often long after that. His years of school grow longer and busier, and now even his playtime is to be more closely guarded and supervised. Yet it is to be hoped that here the guarding and supervising will be specially directed to preserving his independence and his choice of leisure occupation.

Games are good for all, yet playtime should emphatically not be all games: this is where our public schools have failed us; they have given too much importance to games, and almost none to private enterprise in constructive play. In the little contrivances of children lie the germs of vast mechanical and artistic enterprises. The marvelous crafts passed on to us from ancient days in every land were never the result of training in schools, they partook more of the qualities of what I would call "constructive play," passed on from parent to child, each new thing a little different from any other, changing and varying in every age, yet all through a pleasure and a joy to their makers. Our trades and our crafts have all their beginnings in the immature constructions we make as children. We build houses, we furnish them, we make instruments of music (and un-music), we make ships, we fashion vessels of clay, and wood, and metal; we weave and we paint; we dimly foresaw the days when men should fly like birds, and we made kites. All this went on for countless generations, and then we laid captive the steam and the electric current, and lo! a change; all things are possible. Yet we have had a set back; we have forgotten awhile that the spirit in all of us is greater than the machine. We have allowed our machines to make our toys, and instead of being toy-makers our children have to some extent become toy breakers, not because they are really trying to destroy, but because they have the right and natural desire to see how a thing is made. It is not enough, however, to know this; it is very essential that a child should make for himself, and the probability is that if the thing is easily bought he will not take the trouble to make it. He will be inclined to take it for granted that just because it is a "commercial" article, a thing to be bought in a shop, he cannot make it. Toys imported from abroad have been so plentiful and so cheap of late years that the children of to-day rarely attempt to make them for themselves, and they are immensely the poorer, intellectually speaking, for the lack of this necessity to make them. It is for this reason that I have gathered together a small collection of the contrivances of past generations, and the present generation too, not in order that they serve as mere subjects for copy, but because in making such things children develop ideas for improving upon them, and for making new things.

This little collection of works and enterprises is brought together as a suggestion for what Scottish folk so aptly call "ploys," which the children may undertake without much help or instruction. Later on it may be possible to collect a more mature series of suggestions for recreative work in evening schools and continuation classes. There are people everywhere whose work during the day is so taxing that they cannot continue to strain mind and hand at the usual subjects given in evening schools, and yet they can learn to employ their leisure time very profitably by work which does not demand either mental strain, nor highly developed skill, nor any elaborate outfit, nor noisy methods of construction. It must be truly "leisure" work, and be planned to give refreshment and stimulation and "play" to weary brain and body.

Such gentle fireside crafts as the decoration of pottery, and coarse and effective needlework are delightful to practice of an evening, and need give no trouble to the tidy and anxious Marthas of the household. No evenings are more pleasant than those I have spent with friends all busy at quiet crafts round the hearth, chatting a little, or listening to a reader, or singing simple songs in parts, and with no accompaniment of instruments. Constructive design for either of these two crafts is a delightful thing for either men or women of any age. We are never too old to learn to design patterns so long as our hands are able to guide a pen. For what is writing but pattern. Each of us writes his or her name to an individual design, easily recognized so soon as our hand has learned to control our instrument. Patterns for these simple crafts should therefore emanate from the minds of the workers themselves, and should never be copied if it is possible to avoid it.

This spirit of creativeness and invention should find a special period for its development in the day's time-table, and it would be immensely helpful and interesting if teachers would make collections of "outstanding" productions from the children, and if little loan collections of these might travel round from place to place. The children themselves are always intensely interested in seeing such things—and sometimes the older folk who have not forgotten to be children are even more so. I have always urged that craft-work from our various educational centers should go "on tour" in this way, and I keep a large quantity of needlework which shows individuality, from all sorts of schools, going round the country. This usually is shown to teachers only, which limits its sphere, for the children themselves show a most enthusiastic interest in it, and whenever I have shown such work to children in elementary schools, the chorus of excited little voices usually repeats, "Oh, I could do that," which is exactly what is needed for a good beginning. How charming it would be if municipalities would have in every museum a section of "modern craft work," independent of the collections of antiquities we store up. For we also have beautiful things being created amongst us, no less beautiful because they result from the demands of modern needs and usages.

New habits of life produce new demands, and children quickly catch new ideas and adapt themselves to the use of hitherto unknown materials. This is especially the case in cities, and the suggested constructions for the playwork subjects in this book are almost all made out of the waste materials the children may readily find at hand, and they are put together as far as possible, without any particular need for skill, and with the fewest and simplest of tools. In the country there is always an immense wealth of superfluous