The kindergarten tries to provide a room, more or less attractive, quantities of pictures and objects of interest, growing plants and vines, vases of flowers, and plenty of light, air, and sunshine.  A canary chirps in one corner, perhaps; and very likely there will be a cat curled up somewhere, or a forlorn dog which has followed the children into this safe shelter.  It is a pretty, pleasant, domestic interior, charming and grateful to the senses.  The kindergartner looks as if she were glad to be there, and the children are generally smiling.  Everybody seems alive.  The work, lying cosily about, is neat, artistic, and suggestive.  The children pass out of their seats to the cheerful sound of music, and are presently joining in an ideal sort of game, where, in place of the mawkish sentimentality of “Sally Walker,” of obnoxious memory, we see all sorts of healthful, poetic, childlike fancies woven into song.  Rudeness is, for the most part, banished.  The little human butterflies and bees and birds flit hither and thither in the circle; the make-believe trees hold up their branches, and the flowers their cups; and everybody seems merry and content.  As they pass out the door, good-bys and bows and kisses are wafted backward into the room; for the manners of polite society are observed in everything.

You draw a deep breath.  This is a real kindergarten, and it is like a little piece of the millennium.  “Everything is so very pretty and charming,” says the visitor.  Yes, so it is.  But all this color, beauty, grace, symmetry, daintiness, delicacy, and refinement, though it seems to address and develop the aesthetic side of the child’s nature, has in reality a very profound ethical significance.  We have all seen the preternatural virtue of the child who wears her best dress, hat, and shoes on the same august occasion.  Children are tidier and more careful in a dainty, well-kept room.  They treat pretty materials more respectfully than ugly ones.  They are inclined to be ashamed, at least in a slight degree, of uncleanliness, vulgarity, and brutality, when they see them in broad contrast with beauty and harmony and order.  For the most part, they try “to live up to” the place in which they find themselves.  There is some connection between manners and morals.  It is very elusive and, perhaps, not very deep; but it exists.  Vice does not flourish alike in all conditions and localities, by any means.  An ignorant negro was overheard praying, “Let me so lib dat when I die I may hab manners, dat I may know what to say when I see my heabenly Lord!” Well, I dare say we shall need good manners as well as good morals in heaven; and the constant cultivation of the one from right motives might give us an unexpected impetus toward the other.  If the systematic development of the sense of beauty and order has an ethical significance, so has the happy atmosphere of the kindergarten an influence in the same direction.