Outline Lessons for Bands of Mercy. By C. E. Symonds.
(Skeffington and Son. 2s. net.)—A few words of praise are due to this little book. Want of thought is the cause of much cruelty to animals, and here children are taught to think. The lessons rouse their imaginations and help them to realise what animals dependent on them feel. One of the means used is to appeal to the children's sympathy by showing them that these creatures feel and think in something of the way that they themselves do. We all know this is so in the case of dogs, cats, and horses; but few realise it of sheep. There is the story, for instance, of how one sheep went to fetch another that had not heard the shepherd's call. (It seems a mistake to speak of our " having got into the way of driving our sheep it used not to be so in old days." In the East the shepherd still goes before ; in the West he has always gone behind; and there is doubtless a good reason.) The children would have been interested by being told how sheep, possibly alone among animals, have a regular game of "King in the Castle."
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