I

ILLNESS broke in upon the beginning of Harold’s academic career. He did not get fairly under way until he was seven years old and over. That was not so long ago but that we can easily recall the warm flush of pride with which we received the formal notice that our son Harold had passed his Entrance Examinations for the Second Grade and was now qualified to take up the reading of ordinary numerals to 1000 and Roman numerals to XX, with addition through 9’s, and the multiplication table to 5×9, not to mention objective work in simple fractions and problems. The notion of Harold’s ‘entrance examinations’ amused Emmeline intensely. At least, she took occasion during the next, two weeks to read the certificate out aloud to visitors, laughing almost spontaneously. But when visitors were not about she would sometimes pull out the printed card and look at it quietly, still smiling, but with no evident signs of hilarity. She said that mornings, after nine, it was very quiet in the house nowadays. It was delightful but strange.

If school brought any spiritual crisis to Harold he gave no sign of it. An extraordinary calm in the face of exceptional circumstances is one of the traits I envy him. Possibly this may be because nobody or nothing that presents itself to him from the outside can ever approach in interest the things that are going on inside of him. He will be shy before strangers, but I am inclined to think that the Dalai Lama of Tibet would leave him unruffled. Kings and emperors have a logical place in Harold’s world of ideas, whereas an ordinary visitor in the house needs to have his presence explained.

Harold’s self-possession was shown in the manner in which he conducted himself during his entrance examinations. The questions were oral. He had just been asked to name the days of the week when he noticed that one of his shoe-laces had come loose. He stooped, adjusted his shoe-lace, and gave the days of the week correctly. The operation on his shoe was not completed when he was asked how much is three and four. He solved the problem while still in a semi-circular position. When Emmeline heard of his behavior during the test she was in despair. She foresaw the blasting of Harold’s educational career at the very start. She was of a mind to call up the school authorities and let them know that the boy did not usually answer questions from the vicinity of his shoe-tops, and that probably it was nervousness. But the school authorities evidently knew better. They probably discerned in Harold an equanimity of the soul, a Spartan calm, which it is one of the main purposes of pedagogy to develop.

Harold’s self-possession is never more conspicuous than during the two hours which intervene between his getting out of bed and his departure for school. The flight of time does not exist for him. He goes about his toilet with exquisite deliberation. If anything, he dresses and washes with greater leisureliness from Monday to Friday than he does on the other two days of the week. It is not an aversion for school. It is not even indifference. Harold does not creep like a snail to school. He goes cheerfully when we tell him that he is ready to go. But while the business of getting him ready is under way he views the process objectively. It is as if some strange little boy were being washed and combed and urged through his breakfast until the moment when, everything being done, the spirit of himself, Harold, enters that alien body and propels it to school. As sailing master of his soul it is not for him to bother with loading the cargo and battening down the hatches. Only when the hawsers are ready to be cast off — it is ten minutes of nine and Emmeline’s nerves are on edge — does the master ascend the bridge. Once outside the door of Belshazzar Court he makes excellent speed. I have warned him repeatedly, but he always trots instead of walking, and his manner of crossing the avenue gives us some anxiety on account of the cars and the automobiles.

Sometimes I think that Emmeline and I assume the wrong attitude towards Harold’s leisurely ways between seven and nine in the morning. In our behalf it must be said, of course, that getting a boy washed and dressed and fed, with only two hours to do it in, is a task that calls for expedition. But in our anxiety to get Harold off to school in time we are sometimes tempted to overlook the boy’s extraordinary spiritual activity during these two hours. It is then that the events of the preceding day pass in swift procession through his mind. At the dinner table the night before Harold has been silent as usual, and apparently indifferent to the conversation. Nevertheless, my remarks about the general European war have been caught and registered for fuller investigation. At the dinner table he is too busy balancing the books of his own daily concerns. In the morning he is a bottomless vessel of curiosity. In the morning, while brushing his teeth or over his egg-cup, he will demand a detailed statement of the causes behind the present European situation. A stranger watching Harold in the act of pulling on his stockings might suppose that the boy is imperfectly awake. But I know that his stockings get tangled up because he is pondering on the character and motives of the Kaiser and other problems, which must be immediately referred to me who am busy before the shaving mirror.

On such occasions I confess that I frequently dispose of the European situation with a display of summary authority which President Wilson would never tolerate in a Mexican dictator. Or else I describe the Kaiser in a few ill-chosen and inadequate phrases such as naturally suggest themselves to one in a hurry before the shaving mirror. Later I feel that we are unjust to the boy, and neglectful of the educational opportunities he affords us.

If the secret of pedagogy is to find the moment when the child’s mind is in its most receptive state, and to feed it with the information which at other times involves effort to absorb, it seems a pity that at. 7.30 in the morning I should be busy with my razor and the boy should be driven back on his stockings and toothbrush. I have seldom encountered a human being so eager to be instructed as Harold is at twenty minutes of nine, with his glass of milk still before him. Some day an educational reformer will cut the ground from under the Froebelians and Tolstoïans and Montessorians by devising a system of bedroom and bathroom and breakfast-table education. Under such a system all the instructor would have to do would be to follow the child about while he is getting ready for school, and answer questions. Fifteen minutes with Harold while he is lacing his shoes would give his instructor all the mental spontaneity and spiritual thirst he bargained for.

II

Our knowledge of what happens to Harold at school between the hours of nine and one is fragmentary. From the school syllabus we learn, of course, that besides being engaged upon the art of reading numbers up to 1000 and Roman numerals to XX, supplemented by the multiplication table as far as 5×9, Harold is being instructed in English Literature, in Language, in History beginning with Early Life on Manhattan, in Nature Study, in the Industrial and Fine Arts, in Music and Physical Training. We have, too, occasional reports from the schoolroom regarding Harold’s backwardness in concentration and penmanship, as opposed to his proficiency in Language and History.

Then there are mothers’ meetings. But either such information is too theoretical to enlighten us concerning what actually goes inside of Harold at school, or else, as in the case of his deficiency in concentration and penmanship, it is too specific. Of the boy’s mental growth in the round we have no way of judging except as he reveals himself spontaneously. And Harold reveals very little. His school life falls from his shoulders the moment he steps out into the street. If there were no syllabuses, mothers’ meetings, and occasional reports, and we were left to find out the nature of Harold’s curriculum from what he offers to tell, our ideas would be even more fragmentary than they are.

What we are compelled to do is to piece together stray remarks at table or while the boy is dressing or undressing, delivered with no particular relevance, or else, if relevant, uttered in a matter-of-fact tone, as having no very intimate relation to himself, much as I might throw out an item from the evening paper to fill up a blank in conversation. Thus nonchalantly, spasmodically, and some time before I was impelled to consult the syllabus to find out what Harold is supposed to be doing at school, I did find out that he models in clay, that he sews his own Indian suit for the Commencement pageant, that he does practical gardening and folk-dancing. I am not sure about basket-work and elementary wood-carving. We know that he writes, because there has been some complaint about his lack of neatness, which his teacher is inclined to explain as arising from the broader defect of inadequate attention.

You must not suppose that Harold is an indifferent scholar in the sense of being a poor student or devoid of the sense of duty. Of his ambition I am not so sure. The fact remains that he passed his entrance examinations easily, and that at the end of the year, in spite of a month’s absence on account of measles, he was promoted to Grade III. Harold is indifferent only to the extent that he does not bring his school away with him as I bring my own work home with me, to worry over. Harold’s reticence is partly due to his highly developed sense of the sanctity and sufficiency of his private thoughts. Partly it is due to the capacity of every child to live in the moment and let it drop from him when he passes on to the next interest, whether it be from school to lunch, or from lunch to play, or from play to supper.

But on the whole I consider Harold’s lack of conversation about school as in the highest sense a tribute to the efficiency of his teachers, and as evidence that he is happy with them. School has fitted so well into his scheme of life, has been accepted by him as so much a matter of course, that he no more thinks it necessary to refer to school than he would to the fact that he has enjoyed his supper. You have seen children of Harold’s age at the shore, rolling like little porpoises in the surf, as happy as it is given to us to be happy here; but I should never expect Harold to join in the porch comment on the temperature of the water and its effect on his appetite or his sleep. Because the truest happiness is that about which we do not babble, I assume that Harold is happy at school. He is helped to that by the fact that he is a normal child, armed against tribulation by a well-seasoned conscience and a sense of his own rectitude.

In conversation at table, Harold’s teacher will come up with a sufficient frequency to show that she is a factor in his life. The mention of Harold’s teacher will sometimes irritate Emmeline because the boy is in the habit of citing teacher as an authority on elementary truths which Emmeline has been at much pains to inculcate. By way of nothing in particular — Harold’s disclosures of his school life are nearly always by way of nothing in particular — he will declare that his teacher said that to bolt food without chewing is bad for the digestion. Inasmuch as Emmeline has devoted several years to training Harold in that important physiological principle, she is rather vexed that a single statement by teacher should have assumed an authority which prolonged instruction on her own part has failed to attain. Or there will be a somewhat harassing dispute as to whether it is time for Harold to go to bed. The next morning while pulling on his stockings, Harold will declare — incidentally, Harold is always in a mood the morning after to confess that he was in the wrong the night before — will declare that his teacher said that boys who did not sleep enough had something or other happen to their chests and shoulders which prevented them from playing football when they grew up. I do not mean to say that teacher’s word will count as against Emmeline’s. But it hurts to have the boy look outside for sanctions for a code of behavior in which he has been drilled at home. I imagine that it is in such moments that Emmeline feels the first pangs of a child’s ingratitude. But it is a trait which has value and significance. When Harold, who has been drinking milk with his meals since infancy, observes that his teacher said that milk is good for children, it occurs to me that he is only experiencing that need for an external prop for useful habits which is at the basis of religion.

Not that there is in Harold’s attitude to his teacher anything of religious awe. She is simply the exponent of the laws of his environment, laws which the boy knows cannot be violated as can so many of the laws enunciated at home which are subject to suspension and modification. To every child, I imagine, school is the place where the rule prevails, and home is the place where exceptions to the rule may be safely invoked. Here is the fallacy in so much modern speculation concerning parents and teachers which would confound the functions of the home and the school by injecting the rule of affection into the school and the rule of discipline into the home. If the home is to remain a little isle of peace for its members I fail to see why Harold should be less entitled than I to invoke its asylum. If I find in the home a refuge from the hard competitive conditions of my business life, Harold should rightly find there a refuge from the fairly rigid rules without which school is inconceivable. I disagree with the prevalent theory in being not at all sure that women who are mothers make the best teachers. And I am not sure that women who have taught children in class make the best mothers. In the externals of method and discipline they may have the advantage. But it is absurd to suppose that the principles which guide a woman in charge of the little community of the classroom are the relations which should subsist between the mother and the handful of children of her own body.

III

An exceedingly complex subject, this question of the freedom of the child. I am not sure that I understand it. Neither am I sure that the militant advocates of the freedom of the child understand it. At any rate, in so many arguments concerning the rights of the child, I find a lurking argument for the rights of the parents as against the child. The great implication seems to be that the modern way for a mother to love her children is to have the teacher love t hem for her. The modern way to train the child is to deny him the indulgences which he, as the victim of several tens of thousands of years of foolish practice, has learned to expect from his parents. The freedom of the child seems to demand that he shall be restrained in the desire for personal communion with his parents which may interfere with the latter’s freedom to realize themselves in their own adult interests ; whereas at school the child must not be restrained in going about the serious business of his life. There must be method and discipline in the matter of a child’s sitting up after supper to wait for father from the office; but he must be allowed the utmost freedom in learning to read numbers up to 1000 and Roman numerals up to XX. No fetters must be imposed upon Harold’s personality when he is studying the date of the discovery of America, but there are rigorous limitations on the number of minutes he is to frolic with me in bed or to interrupt me at the typewriter when I am engaged in rapping out copy which the world could spare much more easily than Harold’s soul can spare a half-hour of communion with me.

Am I wrong in thinking of the reorganized child-life àla Bernard Shaw as a scheme under which the schoolboy with shining face creeps unwillingly home and little girls do samplers saying, ‘God bless our School’? Home, a phalanstery of individuals, mature and immature, with sharply defined rules against mutual intrusion. School, a place with no rules of conduct save those working secretly, — an anarchy saved from complete chaos by a concealed benevolent despotism àla Montessori. The advanced child-culturists puzzle me. In life they just adore selfrealization in the face of adverse circumstances. In life they believe that character-building is attained by man’s knocking his head against his environment, and love for liberty is nourished only under despotism. Why not apply the same logic to the child in school? What sort of mental and moral fibre is developed by having the child in conflict with nothing in particular? How can any one, child or adult, revolt against the mush of the super-Froebelian, super-Montessorian methods of pedagogical non-resistance ?

I know that I am now skirting the edge of the familiar argument that Latin conjugations are not an end in themselves but a discipline. But I am not interested in that mental training which the modern individualists of pedagogy are inclined to dismiss as of little value, but in the formation of character which they are so intimately concerned with. If it is character reactions that they demand, how, I repeat, can a child react in the absence of opposition? It is Mr. Shaw’s grievance against the English public school that it made him forget a good deal of the Latin he knew before he entered school. This is, of course, a fatal argument. Any system which would have filled Bernard Shaw with Latin to the exclusion of the qualities which have given us Shaw, would stand condemned. Whereas a scholastic system which set up in the boy exactly the same kind of Shavian reactions which are set up by the present social system in the author of Fanny’s First Play obviously does not stand convicted of crushing the child’s individuality.

So I reassert, my suspicion that much of this clamor for the freedom of the child arises from the desire to be spared the trouble of regulating the child. We are more sensitive than the English parent who hands his boy over to the boarding-school, yet we are not prepared to shoulder the trouble of keeping the boy at home. So we still send him away, but insist that his school shall be home, that he shall receive from his schoolmaster the love we deny him, and that respect for his individual soul which it is impossible for any mass institution to realize, and which only the concentration of love and sacrifice in the home can develop.

Incidentally, I am disconcerted by the broad exceptions I am asked to allow to the epoch-making generalizations of the revolutionary educationists. If you will recall that Mr. Shaw, in his discourses on Parents and Children, demands a reconstruction of schools, of homes, and of parents, — in other words, a new world-order, — and all in the name of education, it is a setback to have one of his disciples remark that the master’s statements are much more true of England than of America, where children are not whipped and are not so frequently sent off to boarding-school at the age of six. But what becomes then of the universal nature of the Shaw argument? After a powerful indictment against human and social relations, we are reminded that the indictment will hold only for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The thought occurs that the trouble may not be with human nature but with the United Kingdom, and that instead of revising the home and parenthood and sex relations, we might, revise the British educational system. It is as if I were to arise with uplifted arms to heaven and cry out, ‘Make a clean sweep of the past, O my brethren; away with the superstitions of family and church and courts and the school. Substitute love and reason for law and reticence, and a glorious new age shall dawn for the people of the Twenty-second Assembly District in the County of New York!’

IV

I should be more vehement against the complicated and expensive machinery of Montessorians and Eurythmicians if I believed their methods to be really as efficacious as people would have me believe. I should then protest against the refinements of an educational system which were within the reach only of the privileged few. I am enough of a sans-culotte to grow angry at the thought of all those beautifully balanced systems of pedagogy, of education through music and the dance and rhythmic physical development, which demand elaborate plants, expensive teachers, and a leisureliness which the state and the city can never supply to the children of the masses. If I were a revolutionist of the ardent type, I should be content to make education difficult and expensive, and then insist that all children have it. But I am not a revolutionary optimist, and until the modern state is prepared to spend on its schools fifty times as much as it does to-day, I resent the tendency toward a double system of education, one of joyous and harmonic development for the children of the rich and one of mechanical routine and hard practicality for the other nine children out of ten.

That is, I don’t resent it. What I mean is that I should resent it if the advantages of the costly individualistic system of the Montessorians and Eurythmicians were really superior to the ready-made-store-clothes education offered to the children of the democracy. The expensive educational systems are not a cause but an effect. Any system adopted by the rich for the education of their children will result in the bringing up of sanguine, self-assertive, harmoniously developed thoroughbreds. As between the graduate of the Eurythmic schools of Jacques Dalcroze and the graduate of Public School No. 55, Manhattan, I admit that the former will approach much nearer to the Hellenic ideal of free-stepping, graceful, masterful individuality. But it is not Montessori and Dalcroze who make the child of the income-tax-paying classes a superchild. It is the habit of paying income tax that produces superchildren. The mediæval methods of Eton and Harrow have been turning out precisely the ideal product in the shape of the English gentleman, if poise, a rich appetite, and the assumption of one’s own supreme worth are what you are striving for.

I am enough of a sans-culotte to have been rather cast down when it was decided to send Harold to a private school. There were reasons enough. The boy’s health, upon experiment, was not equal to the strain of a school-day from nine till three in the afternoon (actually, Harold’s school-day began at eight in the morning because of the part-time system enforced by the overcrowding of the classes, which Montessori will have to take into consideration). Harold’s day now is from nine till one, with a brief recess for play and an intermission for lunch if desired; and a schedule of physical training, nature-study, clay-modeling, basketweaving, and pageant rehearsals hold out the promise that there will be no overtaxing of the child’s mind. (Once more I fall victim to my antiquated prejudices, when I imply that modeling in clay and sewing Indian costumes do not involve a strain on the mind. I know that the newer psychology and the newer pedagogy have shown that there is more cerebration involved in cutting out paper patterns than in memorizing the multiplication table. But I am slave to the old vocabulary. The reader forewarned will make the proper deductions.)

Nevertheless I did feel a pang at separating Harold from the public school. Emmeline laughed and asked whether I was afraid that Harold would turn out a snob. Perhaps I was a bit afraid of that, but at bottom it was not fear that Harold would go to the bad in the private school, but that he would do very well there. In other words, it was the feeling I have just expressed, whether it was fair that Harold should be put into the way of having a very delightful time at school, with light hours under splendid hygienic conditions and work reduced largely to play, while so many children of his age cannot afford such advantages. That is, not advantages. As I have said, Harold will probably not get more out of his small, carefully guarded classes than the other children will get out of the overcrowded classes in the public school. But as a sign of social inequality the thing offended me. If you will, you may call this a gospel of envy. But in my heart I could not help taking sides with the children of the disinherited against Harold as a representative of the exploiting classes.

As to the fear of Harold’s turning into a snob, that has long been shown to be completely unfounded. On this subject Harold’s itinerary from his school to Belshazzar Court is illuminating evidence. I have said that in the morning Harold trots to school. In the morning Harold probably gets to school in five minutes. Returning, it takes him half an hour. Emmeline has questioned him on the subject. It appears that in returning from school Harold maps a course due north by west by east by south, so as to cover every local bit of topography which comes within his knowledge during the play hours of the afternoon. He tacks around unnecessary corners. He beats his way up a hill in the park which is a favorite tourney place for the marble-players of the vicinity. He skirts the shore of several window-displays, to the contents of which he has turned the conversation at home on several occasions. For five minutes at a time he is totally becalmed against some smooth expanse of brick wall excellent for handball practice, or on a sheltered corner for a bit of preliminary knuckle exercises with his agates and his ‘immies.’ The White Wing flushing the pavement engages Harold’s attention for as long as the work may seem to demand. Then, having assured himself that the world at one-thirty in the afternoon is very much as he left it at six o’clock the night before, he hastens to his lunch.

No, there is little danger of the boy’s growing up an aristocrat. The fierce democracy of the Street has him in its grasp. He chooses his playmates by preference from the lower classes. He is like Walt Whitman in the way he singles out the dirtiest little boy in the block and says to him ‘Camerado.’ He takes the world of his fellow men as he finds it. When Harold was first sent off to school Emmeline was concerned to find a nice little boy for him to play with. She found one in a classmate of Harold’s. We invited him to the house and in half an hour a considerable portion of the wall-paper in Harold’s room was hanging in fringes. But in spite of a common basis of taste and temperament the two boys were not much together, for the very reason, I presume, that their friendship had been to some extent imposed on them from above.

No; Harold’s tastes go down straight to the foundations of our social structure. Without recognizing class distinctions, he would rather play marbles with the soil of a retail tradesman than with the son of a college professor, with the son of a janitor than with the son of a store-keeper. If the janitor is a Negro so much the better. The Negro boys have an advantage over Harold in the matter of tint at the beginning of a game of marbles. But within half an hour Harold has overcome the handicap. If anything, his is the deeper shade of brown, though his color is not so evenly distributed. In such a guise I can recognize Harold by a sort of instinct. But the only way in which a stranger could tell the child of Caucasian descent from the child of the Hamite would be by measuring Harold’s cephalic index.

V

It is a serious problem — the profits of democracy and the price we must pay. There are the obvious advantages: the boy’s education in the sense of human fellowship without regard to caste and color; his education in the rough and ready but fairly equitable laws of the street ; his gain in self-confidcnce and self-restraint in play; not to mention the extremely beneficent effect on his appetite and his digestion. I have watched the boy at his marbles in the park, more eager, more drunken with the joy of existence, than he is at school or in the house. I have seen him sprawl down on his knees and with the pad of his palm and four outstretched fingers measure off eight or ten horrible hand-spaces in the dust from the hole to his opponent’s marble. I have seen him rise from the earth like Antaeus, triumphant but horribly besmirched, with the blue of his eyes gleaming piratically through the circumjacent soil; I have watched him and rejoiced and had my qualms.

The price that Harold pays for democracy is in a slovenliness of speech which I find offensive and Emmeline finds utterly distracting. It seems a pity to have his school drill in phonetics and the memorizing of good literature vitiated by the slurred and clipped syllables of the street. Harold says, ‘ It is me,’ and frequently he says, ‘It is nuttin’.’ The final g of the participle has virtually disappeared from his vocabulary. He sometimes says, ‘I ain’t got nuttin’.’ While Emmeline is distracted I am merely offended, because I recall that there is a great body of linguistic authority growing up in favor of Harold’s democratic practices in phonetics and grammar. When Harold says, ‘It is me,’ Professor Lounsbury should worry. By the time Harold grows up it will probably be good grammar to say, ‘I ain’t, got nothing.’ By the time Harold grows up, the Decalogue, in its latest recension, will read, ‘Thou shalt not have none other gods before I,’ and, ‘Thou shalt not bear no false witness against none of thy neighbors.’ I must not forget that whereas I was brought up on Matthew Arnold, De Quincey, and Stevenson, Harold is growing up in the age of John Masefield. If literature is to be racy of the soil — and for that matter if not only our speech and our literature, but our morals and our social outlook are to be racy of the soil — if in every section of life the cry is to be back to the land, to the primitive, to the unashamed, sex-education, untrammeled art, democracy at its broadest, if — well, what I mean is that in any civilization based upon close contact with the soil Harold will not be lost. Soil is right in his line.

I am less concerned with the effect of the street upon Harold’s vernacular because the boy seems gratefully immune against the more sordid aspects of the open-air life. His phonetics and grammar are deteriorating, but there is no trace of foulness in his speech or in his thoughts. The reason is that Harold’s open-air activities are confined entirely to play. His democracy centres about the ball ground and the marble pit. His absorption in games is so complete — Loo complete to judge by the nervous exhaustion it sometimes brings — that it leaves no leisure or inclination for idle speech. His technical vocabulary of the game is complete. I sometimes marvel at the ease with which he has mastered the patois of sport — those cabalistic words which, shouted at the proper moment, signify that Harold prefers to let his marble rest and have his opponent shoot at him, or that he has chosen to mark off so many hand-spaces in the dirt and shoot at his opponent. But once the game is done he comes upstairs. He does not share in the peripatetics of the gang, and he knows absolutely nothing of the premature intimacies of street childhood with the bitterness of life. On the whole I find the balance is in favor of marbles and democracy.

Harold in the open air is an exceedingly important factor and a badly neglected one in present-day discussion of the child. The talk is either of the school or the home. If play is taken into account it is the regulated play of the school-ground. Yet the street, as the citadel of the liberties of the child, is overlooked. Take the actual question of hours in Harold’s day. He spends nearly twelve hours in bed, from seven to seven. He spends two hours, almost, at his meals. He spends four hours at school. He spends five hours, at least, in play. Under such an arrangement all talk about the despotism of school and the despotism of parents loses meaning to me. I have shown that the boy’s school-life is happy. But even if it were not, even if his body and soul were subjected to the tyrannies Mr. Bernard Shaw calls up, those twelve hours of sleep and five hours of play are a reservoir of physical and spiritual recuperation which would make life more than tolerable to Harold. On the whole I think I am not less sensitive than Harold to pain and oppression. But if my employer were to let me sleep twelve hours in the twenty-four and play five hours and spend two hours at table, I should consider myself a very happy man.

I have reserved my confession for the very last. I find it difficult to take school at Harold’s age — or for that matter at any age — seriously enough to grow extremely agitated over its problems. Montessori or Dr. Birch — the difference is not vast. Naturally I do not go as far as Mr. Squeers. School is just a ripple on the surface of the ocean of young life and feeling, and whether the ripple shapes after the Froebel pattern or the Montessori wrinkle, makes little difference to the depths below. I can make the assertion with confidence about Harold without any very precise knowledge of what are the depths in him.