individual, but very often you hear, “O Miss X, do come and see what I’ve done!” After about an hour, during which a few of the children have changed their occupations, those who wish to do so join some older children who are playing games involving movement.  This may be a traditional game like Looby Loo, or Round and round the Village, or it may be one of the best of the old Kindergarten games.  After lunch the washing up is to be done in a beautiful new white sink which is displayed with pride.

Our next visit is to a Free Kindergarten.  The rooms are quite as attractive, as rich in charming friezes as in the others, and the furnishing in some ways is much the same.  But here we see what we have not seen before, for here is a large room filled with tiny hammock beds.  The windows are wide open, but the blinds are down, for the children are having their afternoon sleep.

Here, as in all Free Kindergartens, the children are provided with simple but pretty overalls which the parents are pleased to wash.  House shoes are also provided, partly to minimise the noise from active little feet, but principally because the poor little boots are often a painfully inadequate protection from wet pavements.  The children are trained to tidy ways and to independence.  They cannot read, but by picture cards they recognise their own beds, pegs and other properties.  They take out and put away their own things, and give all reasonable help in laying tables and serving food, in washing, dusting and sweeping up crumbs, as is done in any true Kindergarten.

In the garden of this Free Kindergarten there is a large sand-pit, surrounded by a low wooden framework, and having a pole across the middle so that it resembles a cucumber frame and a cover can be thrown over the sand to keep it clean when not in use.

Froebel’s own list of playthings contains, besides balls and building blocks, coloured beads, coloured tablets for laying patterns, coloured papers for cutting, folding and plaiting; pencils, paints and brushes; modelling clay and sand; coloured wool for sewing patterns and pictures; and such little sticks and laths as children living in a forest region find for themselves.  Considered in themselves, apart from the traditions of formality, these are quite good play material or stimuli, and Froebel meant the time to come “when we shall speak of the doll and the hobby horse as the first plays of the awakening life of the girl and the boy,” but he died before he had done so.  In the Mother Songs, too, we find quite a good list of toys which are now to be found in most Kindergartens.