"I don't _quite_ see why _that_ makes the threads pink one way and white
the other," the little girl said, perplexedly, when the explanation was
finished.

"When you go to kindergarten, you will," I suggested.

"But I want to know now," the child demurred.

The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply"
establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to
kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I
took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already
provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors;
and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.

"She understands, _now_, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one
way and white the other!" the mother observed.

"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some
curiosity.

"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time.
She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do the
spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is
made of, and how it is made!"

It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future
than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents
of all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me,
however, that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of