"I once had a sweet little doll, dears, The prettiest doll in the world, Her face was so red and so white, dears, And her hair was so charmingly curled; But I lost my poor little doll, dears, As I played on the heath one day, And I sought for her more than a week, dears, But I never could find where she lay.
"I found my poor little doll, dears, As I played on the heath one day; Folks say she is terribly changed, dears, For her paint is all washed away; And her arms trodden off by the cows, dears, And her hair not the least bit curled; Yet for old sake's sake she is still, dears, The prettiest doll in the world."
"Dolly-o'diamonds, precious lamb, Humming-bird, honey-pot, jewel, jam, Darling delicate-dear-delight-- Angel-o'red, angel-o'white!"
"Take away the doll, you erase from the heart and head feelings, images, poetry, aspiration, experience, ready for application to real life."
Every mother knows the development of tenderness and motherliness that goes on in her little girl through the nursing and petting and teaching and caring for her doll. There is a good deal of journalistic anxiety concerning the decline of mothers. Is it possible that fathers, too, are in any danger of decline? It is impossible to overestimate the sacredness and importance of the mother-spirit in the universe, but the father-spirit is not positively valueless (so far as it goes). The newspaper-pessimists talk comparatively little about developing that in the young male of the species. In three years' practical experience among the children of the poorer classes, and during all the succeeding years, when I have filled the honorary and honorable offices of general-utility woman, story-teller, song-singer, and playmaker-in-ordinary to their royal highnesses, some thousands of babies, I have been struck with the greater hardness of the small boys; a certain coarseness of fibre and lack of sensitiveness which makes them less susceptible, at first, to gentle influences.
Once upon a time I set about developing this father spirit in a group of little gamins whose general attitude toward the weaker sex, toward birds and flowers and insects, toward beauty in distress and wounded sensibility, was in the last degree offensive. In the bird games we had always had a mother bird in the nest with the birdlings; we now introduced a father bird into the game. Though the children had been only a little time in the kindergarten, and were not fully baptized into the spirit of play, still the boys were generally willing to personate the father bird, since their delight in the active and manly occupation of flying about the room seeking worms overshadowed their natural repugnance to feeding the young. This accomplished, we played "Master Rider," in which a small urchin capered about on a hobby horse, going through a variety of adventures, and finally returning with presents to wife and children. This in turn became a matter of natural experience, and we moved towards our grand _coup d'état._