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“How they do love that exercise!” she said, looking after them with shining eyes ... I could have sworn, with mother’s eyes!

“Are you too busy and hurried,” I asked, “to explain to me the game those children are playing with the red and blue rods?”

She answered with some surprise, “Oh, no, I’m not busy and hurried at all!” (quite as though we were not all living in the twentieth century) and went on, “The children can come and find me if they need me.”

So I had my first lesson in the theory of self-education and self-dependence underlying the Montessori apparatus, to the accompaniment of occasional requests for aid, or demands for sympathy over an achievement, made in clear, baby treble. That theory will be taken up later in this book, as this chapter is intended only to be a plain narration of a few of the sights encountered by an ordinary observer in a morning in a Montessori school.

After a time I noticed that four little girls were sitting at a neatly-ordered small table, spread with a white cloth, apparently eating their luncheons. The teacher, in answer to my inquiring glance at them, explained that it was their turn to be the waitresses that day, for the children’s lunch, and so they ate their own meal first.