Froebel’s Second Gift for children, adapted to the age from one to two or three years, with another little book of directions, has also been published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every nursery; for this is the age when many a child’s temper is ruined, and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer want of resource and idea, on the part of nurses and mothers.

But it is to the next age—­from three years old and upwards—­that the Kindergarten becomes the desideratum, if not a necessity.  The isolated home, made into a flower-vase by the application of the principles set forth in the Gifts[A] above mentioned, may do for babies.  But every mother and nurse knows how hard it is to meet the demands of a child too young to be taught to read, but whose opening intelligence and irrepressible bodily activity are so hard to be met by an adult, however genial and active.  Children generally take the temper of their whole lives from this period of their existence.  Then “the twig is bent,” either towards that habit of self-defence which is an ever-renewing cause of selfishness, or to the sun of love-in-exercise, which is the exhaustless source of goodness and beauty.

[Footnote A:  These Gifts, the private enterprise of an invalid lady, the same who first brought the subject of Kindergartens so favorably before the public in the Christian Examiner for November, 1858, can be procured at the Kindergarten, 15 Pinckney Street, Boston.]

The indispensable thing now is a sufficient society of children.  It is only in the society of equals that the social instinct can be gratified, and come into equilibrium with the instinct of self-preservation.  Self-love, and love of others, are equally natural; and before reason is developed, and the proper spiritual life begins, sweet and beautiful childhood may bloom out and imparadise our mortal life.  Let us only give the social instinct of children its fair chance.  For this purpose, a few will not do.  The children of one family are not enough, and do not come along fast enough.  A large company should be gathered out of many families.  It will be found that the little things are at once taken out of themselves, and become interested in each other.  In the variety, affinities develop themselves very prettily, and the rough points of rampant individualities wear off.  We have seen a highly gifted child, who, at home, was—­to use a vulgar, but expressive word—­pesky and odious, with the exacting demands of a powerful, but untrained mind and heart, become “sweet as roses” spontaneously, amidst the rebound of a large, well-ordered, and carefully watched child-society.  Anxious mothers have brought us children, with a thousand deprecations and explanations of their characters, as if they thought we were going to find them little monsters, which their motherly hearts were persuaded they were not, though they behaved like little sanchos at home,—­and, behold, they were as harmonious,