246 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 



And here are the teachers, preachers, writers, 

 reformers, politicians men who deal, not in 

 shoes, but in theories, ideals, principalities, and 

 powers, those large, expansive, balloonish com- 

 modities that show the balloon's propensity to 

 soar and to explode do they not need ballast 

 as much as the shoemaker, bags of plain sand in 

 the shape of the small domestic job ? 



During some months' stay in the city not long 

 ago, I sent my boys to a kindergarten. Neither 

 the principal nor the teachers, naturally, had any 

 children of their own. Teachers of children and 

 mothers' advisers seldom have. I was forced to 

 lead my dear lambs prematurely forth from this 

 Froebel fold, when the principal, looking upon 

 them with tears, exclaimed, " Yes, your farm is 

 no doubt a healthful place, but they will be so 

 without guidance ! They will have no one out 

 there to show them how to play ! " 



That dear woman is ballooning, and without a 

 boy of her own for ballast. Only successful mo- 

 thers and doting old grandfathers (who can still 

 go on all fours) should be allowed to kinder- 

 garten. Who was it but old Priam, to whom 

 Andromache used to lead little Astyanax? 



