600 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



all your musical education and then expect to get your five dol- 

 lars worth out of a Wagner opera. To my mind the best 

 music is none too good for the child, and my experience has been 

 that taught wisely he will learn to love good music. Beginning 

 very young one can give nursery rhymes set to music by J. W. 

 Elliott, a writer of taste and distinction. These melodies are 

 musical and catchy and melodious. Tused for years the kinder- 

 garten book gotten up by Jessie Gaynor, our Missouri composer, 

 of whom we are proud. Nor did I fear to familiarize children, 

 both my own and the neighbors' children, with such master- 

 pieces as Schubert's Erl Koenig, telling them the story and pre- 

 paring some of them for a delightful experience when, in a 

 foreign gallery, I led them to the masterpieces of Schnorr and 

 Schwindt, portraying this mystic creature, and later in another 

 German city they heard the inimitable Lilli Lehman render 

 Schubert's famous song. 



When it has been my pleasure to travel abroad with young 

 people I have been interested to note that they enjoy and profit 

 by what they see and hear just in proportion to their prepara- 

 tion for it. The originals which they most desire to see are those 

 with which they have been familiar through copies. The music 

 they most enjoy is that they have some knowledge of. Many 

 a symphony concert would have been a bore rather than a 

 pleasure to my children had not my Cicilian piano already 

 familiarized them with the masterpieces of Schumann and 

 Schubert and other great composers. 



THE MORAL TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 



(Mrs. Jessie Allen Charters, Columbia.) 



The fundamental factor in all training is the imitative 

 instinct. Children learn by doing, and they do what they see 

 and hear others do. Later in life they may reconstruct their 

 experiences by deliberating upon what they see and hear, and 

 thus their acts are not all directly imitative. But small chil- 

 dren are only copies, imperfect and modified, of the people 

 around them. 



For this reason it is important that children be surrounded 

 by people of the highest ideals and who are doing good things. 

 A child cannot rightly be punished for something copied from 

 its mother or father — when the parents are the highest model 

 he knows. A mother who is not careful to tell exact truth to 



