It may be worth while to notice some things in these notes.  First the pleasure in exploring the new surroundings and then the variety of delights.  Our landscape gardener mentions that “any slope to our grounds should be welcomed....  For as we leave the level land and flee to the mountains to spend our vacation, so will a child avoid the street and seek the gutter and the bank on the unimproved lot to enjoy its pastime.”  Our own children have been fortunate enough to have a bank for their play, and though, unfortunately, extension of buildings has taken away much of this, we have had abundant opportunity to see the value of sloping ground.  Then there are the discoveries, the feathery grasses, especially those which were hidden, the ladybirds, that sand is really “tiny tiny stones”—­has every adult noticed that, or is sand “just sand"?—­and the “wonder” that we can see through glass, a wonder realised by a little girl of four years old.  Also we can notice what the children did not desire.  They liked listening to the thrush, but to make out what the thrush was “saying” was beyond them.  They liked gathering feathery grasses, but to sort these into different kinds gave no pleasure, though older children would have enjoyed trying to find many varieties.

Perhaps teachers with a fair amount of experience might have felt like the beginner who frankly says, “I didn’t say anything more because I didn’t know what to say,” when Dorothy discovered the wonderfulness of glass.  Perhaps we are silent because the child has gone ahead of us.  It is wonderful, but we have never thought about it.  In such cases we must, as Froebel says, “become a learner with the child” and humbly, with real sympathy and earnestness, ask, “Is it wonderful, I suppose it is, but I never thought about it, why do you call it wonderful?” If the child answers, it is well, if not the teacher can go on thinking aloud, thinking with the child.  “Let’s think what other things we can see through.”  We can never understand it, we can only reach the fact of “transparency” as a wonderful property of certain substances and consider which possess this magic quality.  There is water of course, and there is jelly or gelatine, but these are not hard, they are not stones as glass seems to be.  The child will be pleased too to see a crystal or a bit of mica, but the main thing is that we should not imagine we have disposed of the wonder by a mere name with a glib, “Oh, that’s just because it’s transparent,” but that we realise, and reinforce and deepen the child’s sense of wonderfulness.  So teacher and child enter into the thoughts of Him

    Who endlessly was teaching
  Above my spirits utmost reaching,
  What love can do in the leaf or stone,
  So that to master this alone,
  This done in the stone or leaf for me,
  I must go on learning endlessly.

CHAPTER X

A WAY TO GOD