THE COUNTRY HOME [chapter 



sleeping rooms. You will certainly allow every 

 member of your family a separate room at night. 

 It is quite enough that we should cooperate in work, 

 in play, and throughout the day shall fuse our lives. 

 We do not have sufficient opportunity for individual 

 evolution at the best. Much physical illness and 

 more moral enfeeblement depend on the fact that 

 our selfhood is impinged upon all sides. So, what- 

 ever else you do or do not do, let each child have a 

 room of his own, where tastes and thought and life 

 cannot be elbowed. Let him think alone, and plan 

 alone, and, above all, sleep alone. The social side 

 of the family is pretty sure of getting sufficient op- 

 portunity for development. If the child's tastes are 

 peculiar, even outre, let them mainly alone. Con- 

 formity is altogether too strong a drift in our hered- 

 ity. Then, whatever else you yield, do not yield 

 your own private room. 



The library is no longer the most important home 

 center. Books do not have that strictly authorita- 

 tive position that they had half a century ago. Yet 

 in the country one still needs translators and inter- 

 preters. The growing list of nature books, and their 

 increasing popularity, indicates the need on the part 

 of the vast bulk of our population, of help for very 



[ 46 ] 



