A' BABBLED OF GREEN FIELDS l6l 



from cattle or mutton from sheep. The more you 

 contemplate that question, the more appalling its 

 implications become. At her age my daughters 

 not only knew a duck from a chicken; they knew 

 which came first the chicken or the egg and how, 

 and why, and what to do with the chick after it 

 arrived. Yet this child with at least as good a 

 mind but without opportunity to observe and 

 learn not only did not know the difference between 

 a hawk and a handsaw; she was not even conscious 

 that a lot of such widely disparate things as hawks 

 and handsaws existed. To her, food was something 

 you eat off a table three times a day, water some- 

 thing that comes out of a spiggot when you turn the 

 tap, and warmth a thing that circulates in radiators. 



They tell me that in embryo a human being 

 moves up through all the evolutionary stages from 

 the primordial ooze. Whether or not in this process 

 we acquire that part 'of our education variously 

 called instinctive, involuntary, or unconscious, we 

 might at least take a hint from it and, by "expo- 

 sure" to country life teach the growing child how, 

 so to say, its forebears contrived to get all the way 

 from a Piltdown cave mouth to a revolving door 

 on Park Avenue. 



The country fosters self-confidence and self-re- 

 liance; it teaches children that if they are to be 

 cared for, they must ultimately do it themselves; 

 as well as how to do it. Probably because we live 



