If you are skeptical, let me beseech you to join the children in a
Free Kindergarten, and play with them. You will be convinced, not
through your head, perhaps, but through your heart. I remember
converting such a grim female once! You know Henry James says, "Some
women are unmarried by choice, and others by chance, but Olive
Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being." Now, this
predestinate spinster acquaintance of mine, well nigh spoiled by
years of school-teaching in the wrong spirit, was determined to think
kindergarten play simply a piece of nauseating frivolity. She tried
her best, but, kept in the circle with the children five successive
days, she relaxed so completely that it was with the utmost difficulty
that she kept herself from being a butterfly or a bird. It is always
so; no one can resist the unconscious happiness of children.
As for the good that comes to grown people from playing with children
in this joyous freedom and with this deep earnestness of purpose, it
is beyond all imagination.
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