Sleep to the singing of motherbird swinging—
Swinging her nest where her little one lies.
In through the window a moonbeam comes comes—
Little gold moonbeam with misty wings;
All silently creeping, it asks: "Is he sleeping—
Sleeping and dreaming while mother sings?"
The stanzas are from "A Japanese Lullaby," and are selected from a host of similarly dainty verses in Lullaby Land, by Eugene Field (Charles Scribner's Sons).
Robert Louis Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verse is another storehouse of treasure for mothers. Some of his rhymes, such as "Good and Bad Children," are quite equal to Mother Goose in their good advice administered in quaintly merry form, while his "Foreign Lands" and "My Shadow" teach children to idealize the every-day happenings of the home life.
How could a mother better remind her small boy or girl that it is time to waken than by repeating his lines:
A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon the window-sill,
Cocked his shining eye and said:
"Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-head!"
When a mother habitually repeats to her child stories and verses of the character out-
