It is not requisite to make mention here of the swing--the play grounds--the flower borders--and various other matters which are fully treated of in the following portions of this work, further than to add, that they are now generally adopted in schools, and especially in some of the principal training establishments in the British Empire.

As these plans and instruments are used by a certain religious infant-school society, which professes to have imported its system from Switzerland, where such things never had their origin, I feel it necessary most emphatically to repeat, that they are entirely of my own invention.
After the severe bereavement mentioned above, I still persevered in my favourite study, and learned more from my own children than I did before, having to act in the double capacity of father and mother.

I am well aware of the loss my children sustained by the above calamity.
In the matter of training, nothing can replace a good mother,--and such indeed she eminently was! I felt the heavy stroke more severely, and my children did also; but I consoled myself with the reflection, that my loss was her gain, and that she had lived to witness fruits of her unparalleled labours, to the thorough abandonment of self, and the glory of her Maker.

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these little ones, ye have done it unto me." Night and day, when I had time to think, such promises as these cheered and sustained me in doing what I could for my own motherless children, and more and more cemented my affections on the children of others, and, finally, enabled me to mature my plans, and gave me strength and courage to carry them out, first in the villages and places near London, and, ultimately, single-handed and alone, through more than a quarter of a century, in many of the chief cities, towns, and villages of the United Kingdom.

Simply to state this fact is all that is requisite here to answer my present purpose, and to enlarge more upon it is needless, as a full detail of the whole career is given in my "Early Discipline Illustrated; or, the Infant System Progressing and Successful," third edition, published in 1840, and to which much more would require adding to bring it down to the present time, if a further edition should be called for.
That prejudice should assail me, and objections be started as I came more out into the world, was to be expected.