The padre’s smiling face, already known to the Kyronese children, soon ingratiated him as a particular favorite with the Heracleans, and in their charge he soon disappeared, and was afterwards found in the workshop demonstrating the advantage of paneling for strengthening and rendering doors less cumbersome, the parents of the children regarding his handywork with curious admiration. In the neighborhood of twenty acres of land on the southern slope of the hill enclosure were cultivated by the children as a garden and orchard, as well as for the field growth of cereals, with an emulous desire for parental commendation. The distinctions in size being mainly dependent upon age, the Manatitlan gradations were of course impracticable, but the smaller children were constantly under the supervision of their nurses and censors, although not from necessity, as there was an affectionate disposition on the part of the elder and larger boys to offer their backs as steps, and hands as aids to assist the young and weak whenever an opportunity offered. Indeed, the effect of their example, after a few weeks of arbitrary sway, effectually cured the Kyronese children of their fagging dispositions.
Having witnessed the children’s proficiency in a variety of useful pastimes, we were invited to visit the culinary department a second time, to see the food in its prepared state ready to be served. The prætor observing our admiring surprise at the ease with which the various manipulations had been accomplished, without bewraying with dust and adhesive mixtures the persons and clothing of the youthful principals and aids, said that each, with intuitive perception, felt that purity within themselves was necessary for the sanction of confidence in associate reciprocation. To be not only cleanly, but pure, without a questioning thought of subterfuge, was clearly the motor influence of every enactment, with the special desire that their personalities should reflect the refinements of reality. “In all the departments the children are taught by example, that their personal individuality may become responsible to itself for acceptable purity to others in current association; so that in health all their wants of instinct are self supplied, although rendered facile by household coöperation, without unnatural exactions that would beget impressions of mentality. From these exercises of self dependence, the spirit of emulation has proved an incentive to invention.