The Hidden Thimble

1916

Eleanor Fairfield Canfield.

There were seven little girls at Irma's party and they were having a glorious time. It was a farewell party for Mildred Smith, who was going away the next day to live in another city, and none of these little girls knew when they would ever see her again.


They had just decided to play "Hide the thimble;" so Irma went to find a thimble. She looked in her mother's work-basket. The only thimble there was her mother's pretty silver one.

"Mother's busy," thought Irma, "and I don't think she would care if I took this."

They had hidden and found it several times. At last it was Mildred Smith's turn to hide it. They all went out of the parlor.

"Ready," called Mildred, and they started back to look for the thimble, when suddenly, Clang! Clang! rang from the street.

All the little girls ran to the window. The fire-engines were rushing past, the great hoofs of the horses pounding the pavement. It was wonderful to see them.

"When you are through watching the engines, you can come in the dining room, girlies," cried Irma's mother. Soon they were all seated around the table, eating ice cream and cake and chattering happily.

As the little guests were leaving, Mildred promised them all, and the little hostess, too, that she would surely write to them. "I will write you and send you my address," she said, "because I don't know just what it is going to be now."

The next evening Irma's mother picked up the sewing.

"I don't know where my thimble can be," she said, "I can't find it anywhere."

"O mamma," said Irma, and then she stopped short. Where was the thimble? The last thing she remembered about it was that Mildred had hidden it. She told her mother about it, and then she started to look for the thimble.

By the clock, on the mantel, in corners, all around the piano, Irma searched, but no little silver thimble did she find. Her mother looked sober, for she had had that thimble for so long and she loved the person who had given it to her.

"Never mind, Irma, we'll surely find it. Wait until morning light and it may show up," she said. But it did not show up the next day nor the next! And the worst of it was that not a word did anybody hear from Mildred, so they could not write and ask her where she had hid it.

Irma gave it up as lost finally, and very badly she felt about it. She took the money out of the bank and with some more that her father gave her she bought another pretty silver thimble for her mother.

One afternoon in spring the sun shown in through the parlor windows. Irma hapened to look at the ferns that stood on a stand near the window. A ray of light shone straight from the largest sword-fern into her eyes.

"What is it?" she thought, and she got up and walked over to the fern. Then she gave a sharp cry.

"Mother, mother, your thimble!"

Her mother was at her side in a moment. There, resting on a fuzzy graygreen head of a tink[*] fern-leaf, was the thimble!

Mildred had hidden it well among the roots of the sword-fern, and as a tiny leaf had unfolded, it had raised the thimble with it until it just showed above the tangle roots.

"I think the little fern-leaf got tired of having us look for the thimble, and it just had to tell us where it was hidden," said Irma. And mother smiled happily. — Little Ones.

Note: [*] Maybe should be "thin fern-leaf," I don't know. It actually read "tink fer-leaf," and since errors are common in newspaper articles, there's no real reason to assume anything is correct.

New York Children Are Taught to Play

1910

NEW YORK. — There are places where children have to be taught how to play. You might think that the youngsters wouldn't need instruction of this kind. You would be mistaken. Here in New York men and women spend the better part of their lives teaching thousands of children how to play, not only with their muscles, but also with their minds, writes a correspondent. A great many thousand dollars are spent annually by the city just for that purpose, and experience has proved that the time and money are well spent.

The tall tenements of the East side, as full of people as a warren is of rabbits, swarm with eager children. Their fathers and mothers were immigrants. Most of them had no boyhood or girlhood, as most people think of it. They worked for a living before they came to this country; they were hard at work in shops or factories after they came here. They had no traditions of play to hand down to their children. To them play was a foolishness.

Their children, unable to breathe in the tenements, take to the streets, which are dirty or infested with persons and things that are not good for little people to see and hear. Children who have no play places but the streets are apt to absorb unhealthful ideas as well as microbes. Pickpockets and loafers are developed that way. Besides, there is little of play that children can do in the streets. That ogre in cap and blue coat, the policeman, is always snooping about.

These are studies that folks with big minds made for themselves in past years. Little by little they got the city government interested and persuaded a very practical minded school board that it was worth while to provide play places for the children who had none, so the board of education has now in this city 245 playgrounds for children, day and night playgrounds, where the little people are carefully instructed how to frolic.

Mine Fire Burns 25 Years

1915

Blaze Thought Conquered, Rages in Remote Gangways

HAZELTON, Pa., Dec. 16. — The Lehigh & Wilkes-Barre Coal Company is fighting a mine fire at Honey Brook No. 1, that was believed to have been extinguished twenty-five years ago. Stripping operations at the west end of the basin of anthracite fuel uncovered the flames, which were eating up measures which were flooded in the eighties.

In 1906, when the water was tapped from Honey Brook, nine men were choked to death by white damp found in the workings of a residue from the mine fire twenty years ago. No further trace of the blaze was encountered, but it is now believed that it continued to rage in remote gangways cut off by falls of rock from the body of coal that was being worked.



"Didn't Know It Was Loaded"

Pugilist Killed While Fooling With Man's Rifle

NEW BRUNSWICK. N. J., Dec. 16. — George Reed walked into a lunch room here and placed his rifle in a corner and sat down to eat breakfast. In a few minutes Severin J. Kucinsky, a pugilist, 25 years old, came in.

He greeted everybody cheerfully. Then he walked over to the rifle, picked it up and placed the muzzle against his heart.

"Now," he said to Reed, "pull the trigger!"

Reed did so. Kucinsky died two hours later in St. Peter's Hospital. Reed was arrested. He said he thought the gun was empty.

Still in the Kindergarten

1905

Those Who Can Be Interested in Nothing That Is Not a "Game"

After an intelligent and watchful mother had sent her children to a famous kindergarten for several months she withdrew them because she found that they were being ruined by "getting the attitude of regarding everything as a game" — that is, instead of learning through games how to go about the serious business of life, they were learning to approach everything in the careless, make-believe spirit of play.

There is a hint in this for our colleges. There is a hint in it for all those who do puzzles, and play chess, and ride to hounds, and fool with rings and bars to develop their minds and bodies. The world is cursed with tens of thousands of human beings who have the best natural advantages, but can get up the steam of enthusiasm only for some "game" that is useless in its aim, and no more useful in its method, than its corresponding reality would be.

It is as certain as cause and effect that he who takes play seriously will take serious things playfully. — Saturday Evening Post.


Sour Expression Caused Divorce

Carrie Fields has been granted a divorce from Dr. L. S. Fields at Sanborn, Iowa, because the husband did not like her make of pancakes and ridiculed them. She testified that the expression upon the doctor's face when eating the cakes was such it might work permanent injury to her health.

The Playground Movement

1914

Up to a few years ago, it never occurred to the older people that Young America needs a place to play in. It was commonly supposed that a live boy would find plenty of amusement in selling newspapers, running errands, or hoeing the back yard garden. If he must have his game of ball once in a while, there was the street or someone's vacant lot.

As a matter of fact it often happened, even in the country town, that there was no place where a set of boys could play a game of ball without being ordered to quit.

Most American towns were laid out with no provision for the children. There was ample foresight for anything in which money could be made. Railroads and factories never lacked opportunities. Land was often given to attract them. But the cases where land was given where young people could play their games freely, and work off superfluous and threatening energy, were rarely seen.

In the larger cities the modern playground, with a tangle of yelling kidlets, is a sight to do a wholesome-hearted person good. The boy who is chasing a baseball is not robbing fruit nor standing on the street corner smoking cigarettes.

A playground entertaining a large crowd of children does not fully serve its mission unless carefully supervised by some competent person. The average boy gets altogether too much fun from tormenting some one under his size. Also the average crowd of 12-year-olds is very far from ready for self-government.

But even if a neighborhood or a village can merely open up a vacant lot and turn the youngsters loose, the results are worthwhile. In that case the parents will occasionally have to intervene to make Young America "salute the flag."

Burglar Was Refused Food, Breaks In

1920

Burglar Was Refused Food

Begged for "Bite" at Back Door and Upon Denial Breaks in Front

SEATTLE, Feb. 25. — Entering the front door of a residence after he had been refused assistance at the back, a daylight burglar obtained $160 Monday morning in the boldest robbery reported to the police for weeks. Mrs. J. B. Malone reported to the Ballard police station that after she and several of her neighbors had refused to aid a thirty-five-year-old man who was begging through the district she went from her residence, where she had been at work, into a front room and found that $160 had been taken from a bureau drawer. Children playing nearby told of seeing the beggar enter the front door.

—The Evening State Journal and Lincoln Daily News, Lincoln, Nebraska, February 25, 1920, page 8.