DONE TO IMPROVE MRS. CAUDLE'S MIND?" Had he ever sought, with
intelligent illuminating conversation, to direct her thoughts towards
other topics than lent umbrellas and red-headed minxes?

It is my complaint against so many of our teachers. They scold us
for what we do, but so rarely tell us what we ought to do. Tell me
how to talk to my baby, and I am willing to try. It is not as if I
took a personal pride in the phrase: "Did ums." I did not even
invent it. I found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my
experience is that it soothes the Child. When he is howling, and I
say "Did ums" with sympathetic intonation, he stops crying. Possibly
enough it is astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that
silences him. Maybe it is that minor troubles are lost sight of face
to face with the reflection that this is the sort of father with
which fate has provided him. But may not even this be useful to him?
He has got to meet with stupid people in the world. Let him begin by
contemplating me. It will make things easier for him later on. I
put forward the idea in the hope of comforting the young gentleman
from Cambridge.

We injure the health of the Child by enforcing on it silence. We
have a stupid formula that children should be seen and not heard. We
deny it exercise to its lungs. We discourage its natural and
laudable curiosity by telling it not to worry us--not to ask so many
questions.

Won't somebody lend the young gentleman from Cambridge a small and
healthy child just for a week or so, and let the bargain be that he
lives with it all the time? The young gentleman from Cambridge
thinks, when we call up the stairs to say that if we hear another