be mustered by the united efforts of the
eighteen children there are nine ships bought
at toy-shops; eight of which, on trial, were
condemned by the purchasers as lubberly,
and underwent a complete refitting from
keel to topmast. How much neatness of
hand, how much quickness of eye, how much
skill in adapting means to end, these boys
have learned insensibly over such playthings!
How many happy hours they have spent
with them by rivers, lakes, and the sea-shore,
where every ripple, every puff of wind has
been observed and given them a little matter
for reflection! No doubt, young ship-builders
intent upon the neatness of their masts make
a vile litter with shavings on the carpet; but
their work is none the less a work of neatness.
It shall help to make them active,
accurate, and ready-witted men. You do not
bore a boy over his boat about the blending
of instruction with amusement. You
look on.

The toys by which a child's mind is most
usefully developed are indeed always those
which furnish it with the most hearty,
unrestrained enjoyment. It is the act of free
development, the brisk use and expansion of
the body or the mind from which the glow
and pleasure of child's play proceed. Brisk
exercise in youth is necessary for the perfect
forming of a strong and healthy body; it
therefore was beneficently ordered that brisk
exercise in youth should be a source of
physical delight to all but those who would
be injured by it. The restlessness of children
is their pleasure and their need. Precisely
the same rule holds good with regard to the
full development of the peculiar powers of the
mind. The processes of nature are for ever
pointing forward, and we might read much
of a child's future if we would watch wisely
these natural monitions; we might make that
future happier if we would thwart them less
than by our cut-and-dried systems of training
we perpetually do. How thoroughly all
little girls who have home futures in them,
fasten to that genuine girl's toy—the doll!
Nature accepts it as a useful aid, and the
germ of the little woman already begins to
push out a thousand rootlets through the
fertile soil of child's play in which it is
placed.

There were dolls at the German Fair with
wide, unwinking eyes in due abundance. I
bought one and put it in my pocket. As for
the baron two feet high, of grotesque aspect,
since he could only stand upon a table, and
though funny, could not be laughed at for a
week, I passed him by. The little old man
by his kitchen fire, reading a newspaper to
his little old woman, and ditto doing ditto to
ditto in the arbour, winter and summer, I
passed by for the same reason. I booked a
Christmas-tree for my sister Kate, at whose
house we had our family gathering this year,
and very good fun it afforded. The lights,
the toys upon the branches, the
expectations and surprises, and the clamour of a
merry company of children, made the
Christmas-tree a thing of joy and wonder.

There were magnetic toys, and they are
always good. Their action, caused by a
mysterious agency—excites a sense of wonder,
awakens the thoughts to vague and grand
impressions of the unseen powers of nature
—grand impressions, not the less because
their grandeur is not a fact present to the
child; children attain through wonder to
knowledge; to them therefore wonder has
been made an intense pleasure of the mind.
Therefore they delight always in wonderful
stories. Therefore they love balloons—and I
was glad to notice fire balloons among the
German playthings, though it is quite true
that both these and the magnetic toys
improve the speculative rather than the active
qualities of the child's mind. They might be
fairly looked for in the toy-shops of our
thoughtful cousins. With us the balance
turns the other way; we are as a people not
contemplative enough, and wonder-toys might
very usefully be suffered to take part somewhat
more largely than they now do in the
education of our children. How thoroughly
the ascent of a globe into the air, and the
disappearance among the floating clouds, high
overhead, of something that we might have
seen or touched, delights children by the
active play it gives to their instinct of
wonder, we hear every summer in the streets
of London. For ragged children scamper by
our windows screaming joyously Bal-loon!
Bal-loon! whenever the Great Nassau or the
Royal Cremorne looks like an inkblot on the
sky above them.

One of the most beautiful of wonder-toys,
recently added to our stock in England—I did
not see one at the German Fair—is the stereoscope.
If I had seen such a thing at the bazaar
I would have bought it, but I was not
disappointed, for I know that it has found its way
into the London toy-shops. In the use of
these philosophical toys I utterly object to all
attempt to turn them into lessons, or to say
one word about the science that is in them,
more than can be made pleasantly intelligible.
Even the simplest explanations I would give
only in answer to strong curiosity, and just
so far as the curiosity extends, no further.
It is not at all necessary that a child should
do more than wonder at a plaything of this
kind, and feel through it the vastness of the
unknown region that remains to be explored.
Children may learn thus through their play
to have some childish sense of the infinity of
knowledge; that is, to master the essential
groundwork of all human wisdom.

Now ready, price 3s.,
THE THIRD VOLUME OF
THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE OF
CURRENT EVENTS.
A Record of the Public Occurrences of the Past Year.