"It was lots of fun, having it," he said, when, quite well, he came to see me. "It grew so fast--faster than the others."
"At school," he explained. "We have them at school; and they grow fast, but the one you gave me grew faster. Was that because it was in a little glass instead of a big bowl?"
I could not tell him. We had not had them at school in my school-days in a big bowl. They had been out-of-school incidents, cultivated only in little glasses.
They have so many things at school, the children of to-day! If many of these things have been taken from the home, they have only been taken that they may, as it were, be carried back and forth between the home and the school.
I have a friend, the mother of an only child, a boy of eight. Her husband's work requires that the family live in a section of the city largely populated by immigrants. The one school in the vicinity is a large public school. When my friend's little boy reached the "school age," he, perforce, was entered at this school.
"You are an American," his father said to him the day before school opened; "not a foreigner, like almost every child you will find at school. Remember that."
"He doesn't understand what you mean when you talk to him about being an American," the boy's mother said the next morning as we all watched the child run across the street to the school. "How could he, living among foreigners?"
One day, about two months later, the small boy's birthday being near at hand, his father said to him, "If some one were planning to give you something, what should you choose to have it?"
"A flag," the boy said instantly; "an American flag! _Our_ flag!"
"Why?" the father asked, almost involuntarily.
"To salute," the child replied. "I've learned how in school--what to say and what to do. Americans do it when they love their country--like you told me to," he added, eagerly. "Our teacher says so. She's taught us all how to salute the flag. I told her I was an American, not a foreigner like the other children. And she said they could be Americans, too, if they wanted to learn how. So they are going to."
The small boy got his flag. The patriotism taught at home and the patriotism taught at school, diverse at other points, met and mingled at that one most fundamental point.
