It proved to bean easy thing to discover. "I am glad to see that, since you have no parish-house, you are using your church for parish-house activities," I made an early occasion to say to our hostess, after dinner, on the Sunday. "You were not using it in that way when I was here last; it is something very new, isn't it?"
"It is, my dear," said our hostess,--one of those of his flock whom the minister had described as "conservatives of the strictest type"; "'very new' are the exact words with which to speak of it!"
She smiled. "Our minister and his wife declare that my small son and daughter are mainly responsible for it!" she said. "They began to attend the public school this autumn,--they had, up to that time, been taught at home. You know what the population of this town is,--half foreign. Even in the school in this district, there are a considerable number of foreigners. I don't know why it is, when they have so many playmates in their own set, that my children should have made friends, and such close friends, with some of those foreign children! But they did. And not content with bringing them here, they wanted to go to their homes! Of course, I couldn't allow that. I explained to my boy and girl as well as I was able; I told them those people did not know how to live properly; that they might keep their children clean, because they wouldn't be permitted to send them to school unless they did; but their houses were dirty, and their food bad. And what do you think my children said to me? They said, 'Mother, have they _got_ to have their houses dirty? Have they _got_ to have bad food? Couldn't _they_ have things nice, as _we_ have?' It quite startled me to hear my own children ask me such things; it made me think. I told my husband about it; it made him think, too. You know, we are always hearing that, if we _are_ going to try to improve the living conditions of the poor, we must 'begin with the children,'--begin by teaching them better ways of living. Our minister and his wife have all along been eager to teach these foreign children. We have no place to teach them in, except our church. It was rather a wrench for my husband and me,--giving our approval to using a church for a club-house. But we did it. And we secured the consent of the rest of the congregation,--we told them what our children had said. We were not the only ones who thought the children had, to use an old-fashioned theological term, 'been directed' in what they had said!" she concluded.