479 CHILDREN This section tells everything that a mother ought to know and everything she should teach her children. It will contain articles dealing with the whole of a child's life from infancy to womanhood. A few of the subjects are here mentioned : The Baby Education Physical Trainings Amusements Clothes How to Engage a Use of Clubs How to Aj-range a How to Engage a Private Governess Dumb-bells Children's Party Nurse English Schools for Developers Outdoor Games Preparing for Baby Girls Chest Expanders Indoor Games Motherhood Foreign Schools and Exercises without How to Choose Toys What Every Mother Convents Apparatus for Children Should Know, etc. Exchange with Foreign Breathing Exercises The Selection of Story Fain Hies for Learn - Skipping, Books. ing Languages, etc. etc. etc. PRE5EMTS AT CHILDREN'S PARTIES Novel Substitutes for the Orthodox and Time'honoured Christmas'tree — An Auction — The Animated ChristmaS'tree — The Magic Coal' box — Father Christmas with his Sleigh of Snowballs. jWj osT children's Christmas parties end with a distribution of small presents to the little guests. The following suggestions, therefore, may prove useful to those who do not care to spend the time entailed by the decorating ot time-honoured Christmas-trees. An Auction is a game children love. This is easily arranged in the following way : The presents are all made up into brown paper parcels, tied with string in a very busi- ness - like way, care being taken to put a silver thimble, for instance, into a big square box amidst quantities of wrapping paper, while a big toy should be packed into as small a compass as possible, the great idea being that the bidders should be able to glean no idea as to the con- tents of each "lot" as it is put up to auction, from the appearance of the outside. The pre- sents thus disguised cause much merriment as the}' are unwrapped . Children love auctions: an auction present'giving party, therefore, always fascinates To begin the auction, the little son and daughter of the house don suitable cracker caps to represent the auctioneer's man and the auctioneer respectively. The auctioneer should be further provided with a hammer with which to highest bidder. Each guest, before the auction opens, receives several pieces of paper money — made by writing "5s.," "2d.," ;^i,"etc„ upon slips of paper, and with the exact sums marked on their papers they must bid, so that the amounts bid jump from 2d. to £5, sometimes at a single bound, in a most amusing way. When the children have finished bidding against each other for a likely - looking parcel, the auctioneer taps three times with the hammer, crying, " Going, going, going — gone ! " At the third tap the auctioneer's man hands down the parcel tc the highest bidder, receiving his or her money in exchange.
