“If we all do our parts well, the whole is sure to be beautiful,” says the teacher.  “One rickety, badly made building will spoil our village.  I’m going to draw a blackboard picture of the children who live in the village.  Johnny, you haven’t blocks enough for a good factory, and Jennie hasn’t enough for hers.  Why don’t you club together and make a very large, fine one?”

This working for a common purpose, yet with due respect for individuality, is a very important part of kindergarten ethics.  Thus each child learns to subordinate himself to the claims and needs of society without losing himself.  “No man liveth to himself” is the underlying principle of action.

Coming back to the main room we find one division weaving bright paper strips into a mat of contrasting color, and note that the occupation trains the sense of color and of number, and develops dexterity in both hands.

But what is this merry group doing in the farther corner?  These are the babies, bless them! and they are modeling in clay.  What an inspired version of pat-a-cake and mud pies is this!  The sleeves are pushed up, showing a high-water mark of white arm joining little brown paws.  What fun!  They are modeling the seals at the Cliff House (for this chances to be a California kindergarten), and a couple of two-year-olds, who have strayed into this retreat, not because there was any room for them here, but because there wasn’t any room for them anywhere else, are slapping their lumps of clay with all their might, and then rolling it into caterpillars and snakes.  This last is not very educational, you say, but “virtue kindles at the touch of joy,” and some lasting good must be born out of the rational happiness that surrounds even the youngest babies in the kindergarten.

The sand-table in this room represents an Italian or Chinese vegetable garden.  The children have rolled and leveled the surface and laid it off in square beds with walks between.  The planting has been “make believe,”—­a different kind of seed in each bed; but the children have named them all, and labeled the various plats with pieces of paper, fastened in cleft sticks.  A gardener’s house, made of blocks, ornaments one corner, and near it are his tools,—­watering-pot, hoe, rake, spade, etc., all made in cardboard modeling.

We now pass up-stairs.  In one corner a family of twenty children are laying designs in shining rings of steel; and as the graceful curves multiply beneath their clever fingers, the kindergartner is telling them a brief story of a little boy who made with these very rings a design for a beautiful “rose window,” which was copied in stained glass and hung in a great stone church, of which his father was the architect.

Another group of children is folding, by dictation, a four-inch square of colored paper.  The most perfect eye-measure, as well as the most delicate touch, is needed here.  Constant reference to the “sharp” angle, “blunt” angle, square corner and right angle, horizontal and vertical lines, show that the foundation is being laid for a future clear and practical knowledge of geometry, though the word itself is never mentioned.