In such an hour I suddenly said, “Josephus, will you be the father this time?” and without giving him a second to think, we began our familiar lullaby.  The radical nature, the full enormity, of the proposition did not (in that moment of sweet expansion) strike Josephus.  He moved towards the cradle, seated himself in the chair, put his foot upon the rocker, and rocked the baby soberly, while my heart sang in triumph.  After this the fathers as well as the mothers took part in all family games, and this mighty and much-needed reform had been worked through the magic of a fascinating plaything.

WHAT SHALL CHILDREN READ?

“What we make children love and desire is more important than what we make them learn.”

When I was a little girl (oh, six most charming words!)—­it is not necessary to name the year, but it was so long ago that children were still reminded that they should be seen and not heard, and also that they could eat what was set before them or go without (two maxims that suggest a hoary antiquity of time not easily measured by the senses),—­when I was a little girl, I had the great good fortune to live in a country village.

I believe I always had a taste for books; but I will pass over that early period when I manifested it by carrying them to my mouth, and endeavored to assimilate their contents by the cramming process; and also that later stage, which heralded the dawn of the critical faculty, perhaps, when I tore them in bits and held up the tattered fragments with shouts of derisive laughter.  Unlike the critic, no more were given me to mar; but, like the critic, I had marred a good many ere my vandal hand was stayed.

As soon as I could read, I had free access to an excellent medical library, the gloom of which was brightened by a few shelves of theological works, bequeathed to the family by some orthodox ancestor, and tempered by a volume or two of Blackstone; but outside of these, which were emphatically not the stuff my dreams were made of, I can only remember a certain little walnut bookcase hanging on the wall of the family sitting-room.

It had but three shelves, yet all the mysteries of love and life and death were in the score of well-worn volumes that stood there side by side; and we turned to them, year after year, with undiminished interest.  The number never seemed small, the stories never grew tame:  when we came to the end of the third shelf, we simply went back and began again,—­a process all too little known to latter-day children.

I can see them yet, those rows of shabby and incongruous volumes, the contents of which were transferred to our hungry little brains.  Some of them are close at hand now, and I love their ragged corners, their dog’s-eared pages that show the pressure of childish thumbs, and their dear old backs, broken in my service.