The small boy caught sight of me as I stood before one of the charts relating to the prevention of contagious diseases, and ran across the room to me. "What are _you_ looking at?" he said. "That! It shows how many people were vaccinated, doesn't it? Come over here and see the pictures of the calves the doctors get the stuff to vaccinate with from!"
"Isn't this an odd place for a little boy on a Saturday afternoon?" I remarked to my neighbor, a little later, when the boy had roamed to the other side of the room, out of hearing.
"Not at all!" asserted the child's father. "He was inquiring the other day why he had been vaccinated, why all the children at school had been vaccinated. Just before that, he had asked where the water in the tap came from. This is just the place for him right now! It isn't odd at all for him to be here on a Saturday afternoon. It is much odder for _me_" he continued with a smile. "I'd naturally be playing golf! But when children begin to ask questions, one has to do something about answering them; and coming here seemed to be the best way of answering these newest questions of my boy's. I want him to learn about the connection of the state with these things; so he will be ready to do his part in them, when he gets to the 'voting age.'"
"But can he understand, yet?" I ventured.
"More than if he hadn't seen all this, and heard about what it means," my neighbor replied.
It is not unnatural, when a child asks questions so great and so far- reaching as those my neighbor's small boy had put to him, that we should "do something about answering them,"--something as vivid as may be within our power. But, even when the queries are of a minor character, we still bestir ourselves until they are adequately answered.
"Mamma," I heard a little girl inquire recently, as she fingered a scrap of pink gingham of which her mother was making "rompers" for the baby of the family, "why are the threads of this cloth pink when you unravel it one way, and white when you unravel it the other?"
The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to the child about the warp and the woof in weaving.
"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.