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 ? 



Daring 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? 



