Bribes and Threats Will Not Make Them Read:
From eight-thirty in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon, Sarah Anne is at one of our mest exclusive schools. She comes home, wearing her neat blue uniform, carrying her head high.as one belonging to the elect of the earth, and 3 down to a carefully balanced meal of selected calories. Sometimes, -her mother is home, more often she is not, and, very 1 occasionally, before she goes to bed, she sees her father.
There has been a great revival in the use of sage and other culinary] herbs of late, which reminds one that the oldest and simplest herbs have never yet been excelled in the! Tittle touch of piquancy which they] add to so many of our.festive dishes.
"How can a man die who has sage in his: garden?' an_ old Arabian proverb, and the Chinese used to value sage leaves so highly that the early Dutch traders, used to make a very profitable exchange with them of one pound of sage for Sarah Anne's day has been as highly organized as any that Jusiness executive may have spent fu Wall Street, Her hours hay boon carefully fitted one into bother, with periods of recreation regularly measured as the vitamins fu her nach, writes Lydia Kirk in the re-scandal, and even the Scriptures furnish' situations that might occomment if enacted in the drawing-rooms of to-day.
And $0, as we meditate nton th education of Sarah Anne and ce trast it with our own, we can not} help feeling this very lack of spare time may be one of the reason why] reation tastes a little like spinach, many children of to-day have less but, Sarah Anna has been denied, real interest in their books than the of hot pastry children of yesterday. 'They have and spiced sauce she, can not know 0 little opportunity to' know them.
green vegetables and We ourselves have two daughters: th sures of childhood lose their with golden hair and blue eyes who when chopped, passed are not being half so well educated Hhrough a sieve, and disguised with as the superior Sarah Anne, but the back library is theirs whenever they, among the lost _pleasur want it, ard we hope the masters would count the intoxicating of literature may be as familiar to Iposession of time, hours dur-them as the callers they meet at tea dug which nur: and parents may the front drawing-room. fuct intrude, long afternoons in front wraps, another reason why the back library fire wh the children to-day neglect their books whole world is ours for the asking is that, in spite of the authors and and we may settle down upon the printing-presses working overtime geta with Alice-in-Wonderland or for their deneft, a great deal of fame Robsart, with Mowgli or trash la being Produced. Only a Pickwick or the de-few books of lasting value appear absurdity of Christopheach year. 'The others make pretty apr Robin and Pooh. gifts, for they are lovely in their 'A hopeful grandmother once offer-colour and their bindings but the gold piece to. redd "Agnes children pay no attention' to them "Btrickland's "Queens of England." other than to look at the pictures, For some reason, we began in the text, and put them re-with Anne of] speetfully back into place, We and now we make should remember that children are public' cent ion of our sympathy, true conservatives and will not "with Henry VIII. Miss Strickland's easily accept the new or the untried, tyle was not enlivening, half a The eccentric, the abnormal, the chapter was enough. We closed the. quaint, the merely pretty, they book, hoping the German princess reject as quickly as the more dreary ight find consolation for her royal lof the classics, brown volumes like neglect in the beer Miss Stricktand's, the cramped print akittl ho settled upon for life of which was sure indication of But the gold piece was never award~ moral worth. Such books, in the fed, and our experience of the classics words of our youngest daughter, might have been slight had Sir} may be all right for cne of those Walter Scott not stood upon th little girls with curls." She herself shelf beneath, demands quick plot, simple langu-Neither th nor gold pieces age, convincing characterization, will make children take to books. and real humour—in short, good thod is to turn them ose in, 1 wry ax you turn colts 'Books, Muramy," says our eldest, out into a green field. Precautions are all different.' There are books may, be taken to, reeve, certain that should be read aloud in vol but a fow nettles in their sort of voice, like Ligt do the colts little harm, and imand there are poetry books that go proper books are best in a Mummy voice, and there except for those old and curious en- a others that can't be read out hugh to them out. After all, loud at all. They belong just to when Sarah Anne me, They are so much me I can't tube will not find it entirely devoid of, oven explain how I feel about them."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.