for us, would we, the primitive children of those dear, dark ages, have ever thought of wrenching off the cracked blonde head of Ethelinda and buying a new, strange, nameless brunette head, gluing it calmly on Ethelinda’s body, as a small acquaintance of mine did last week, apparently without a single pang?  Never!  A doll had a personality in those times, and has yet, to a few simple backwoods souls, even in this day and generation.  Think of Charles Kingsley’s song,—­“I once had a sweet little doll, dears.”  Can we imagine that as written about one of these modern monstrosities with eyeglasses and corsets and vinaigrettes?

  “I once had a sweet little doll, dears,
  The prettiest doll in the world,
  Her face was so red and so white, dears,
  And her hair was so charmingly curled;
  But I lost my poor little doll, dears,
  As I played on the heath one day,
  And I sought for her more than a week, dears,
  But I never could find where she lay.

  “I found my poor little doll, dears,
  As I played on the heath one day;
  Folks say she is terribly changed, dears,
  For her paint is all washed away;
  And her arms trodden off by the cows, dears,
  And her hair not the least bit curled;
  Yet for old sake’s sake she is still, dears,
  The prettiest doll in the world.”

Long live the doll!

  “Dolly-o’diamonds, precious lamb,
  Humming-bird, honey-pot, jewel, jam,
  Darling delicate-dear-delight—­
  Angel-o’red, angel-o’white!”

“Take away the doll, you erase from the heart and head feelings, images, poetry, aspiration, experience, ready for application to real life.”

Every mother knows the development of tenderness and motherliness that goes on in her little girl through the nursing and petting and teaching and caring for her doll.  There is a good deal of journalistic anxiety concerning the decline of mothers.  Is it possible that fathers, too, are in any danger of decline?  It is impossible to overestimate the sacredness and importance of the mother-spirit in the universe, but the father-spirit is not positively valueless (so far as it goes).  The newspaper-pessimists talk comparatively little about developing that in the young male of the species.  In three years’ practical experience among the children of the poorer classes, and during all the succeeding years, when I have filled the honorary and honorable offices of general-utility woman, story-teller, song-singer, and playmaker-in-ordinary to their royal highnesses, some thousands of babies, I have been struck with the greater hardness of the small boys; a certain coarseness of fibre and lack of sensitiveness which makes them less susceptible, at first, to gentle influences.