Kate Douglas Wiggin.

PREFACE.

The fourteen little stories in this book are not offered as a collection ample enough to satisfy all needs of the kindergartner.

Such a collection should embrace representative stories of all classes—­narrative, realistic, imaginative, scientific, and historical, as well as brief and simple tales for the babies.

An experience of twelve years among kindergartners, however, has shown us that there is room for a number of books like this modest example; containing stories which need no adaptation or arrangement; which are ready for the occasion, and which have been thoroughly tried before audience after audience of children.

The three adaptations, “Benjy in Beast-Land,” “Moufflou,” and the “Porcelain Stove,” have been made as sympathetically as possible.  Their introduction needs no apology, for they are exquisite stories, and in their original form much too advanced for children of the kindergarten age.

Kate Douglas Wiggin. 
Nora A. Smith.

THE ORIOLE’S NEST.

“See how each boy, excited by the actual event, is all ear.”—­Froebel.

There it hangs, on a corner of the picture frame, very much as it hung in the old willow-tree out in the garden.

It was spring time, and I used to move my rocking-chair up to the window, where I could lean out and touch the green branches, and watch there for the wonderful beautiful things to tell my little children in the kindergarten.  There I saw the busy little ants hard at work on the ground below; the patient, dull, brown toads snapping flies in the sunshine; the striped caterpillars lazily crawling up the trunk of the tree; and dozens of merry birds getting ready for housekeeping.

Did you know the birdies “kept house”?  Oh, yes; they never “board” like men and women; indeed, I don’t think they even like to rent a house without fixing it over to suit themselves, but they ’d much rather go to work and build one,

    “So snug and so warm, so cosy and neat,
     To start at their housekeeping all complete.”

Now there hung just inside my window a box of strings, and for two or three days, no matter how many I put into it, when I went to look the next time none could be found.  I had talked to the little girls and scolded the little boys in the house, but no one knew anything about the matter, when one afternoon, as I was sitting there, a beautiful bird with a yellow breast fluttered down from the willow-tree, perched on the window-sill, cocked his saucy head, winked his bright eye, and without saying “If you please,” clipped his naughty little beak into the string box and flew off with a piece of pink twine.

I sat as still as a mouse to see if the little scamp would dare to come back; he didn’t, but he sent his wife, who gave a hop, skip, and a jump, looked me squarely in the eye, and took her string without being a bit afraid.