have too much of words, too little of things," said Daniel Webster, who, though but a short time a teacher, well understood the American school system. Excite in your pupils a burning desire to learn; inspire them with motives. "The primary principle of education," says Sir William Hamilton, "is the determination of the pupil to self-activity."

7. They must learn to practise the principles and precepts of morality.

It is not necessary that they study ethics as a science, or religion as theology. What they most need is that plain preceptive morality which is diffused among the people as their best rules of action in their daily life. You cannot mould character or form good habits by dealing out hackneyed commonplaces, or by merely repeating maxims. The art cannot be conveyed to you in condensed directions or taught in twelve easy lessons. It must be an outgrowth of your own life and character, your own observation and experience combined with the best thoughts you glean from books and men.

III. MISCELLANEOUS THINGS.

Physiology is not an essential text-book study, but it is necessary that your pupils should know something about the laws of health in relation to diet, sleep, air, exercise, work, play, and rest. Teach your pupils that sickness is the penalty of violated laws; that bad habits are physical sins; that bad health, unless hereditary, is the result of carelessness or ignorance. All this you can do without a text-book.

For the right training of the perceptive faculties, you must give elementary lessons in physics, botany, and other

natural sciences. Country boys and girls generally have a considerable stock of crude knowledge, picked up empirically by their own observation, about animals, plants, and the phenomena of every-day life. Draw out this fragmentary store of facts, and supplement it by the facts of science. Set the girls to collecting and pressing flowers. Let the boys bring in specimens of minerals, shells, woods, and grains for a school cabinet. Open their eyes to the harmonies of nature. Teachers are apt to deal too much with books and too little with things; they mistake shadow for substance. Do not depend too much on mechanical "mental discipline," or too little on direct information. A great part of teaching is avowedly empirical, desultory, utilitarian. To acquire information is a mental exercise of no mean order. If you can only find out the secret, you can make your whole school alive to know; but the secret cannot be conveyed in set rules. If you are nothing but a bookworm, you will never learn the

art.

If possible, have some singing, and drawing for those who have any taste for it. If there is a school library, make good use of it by selecting suitable books for your pupils to read, and by questioning them about what they read. Many a dull boy, lazy and listless over his lessons, has been made alive by good story-books. If you have tact, good-nature, and firmness, you need not have much trouble about order, discipline, or government. Win the good-will of the older scholars, and they will become your assistants in governing.

Keep in mind this central fact, that in country schools certain leading results must be obtained, even at the sacrifice of ornament and system. Only concentration can

give strength. Make your pupils learn well the things they most need in the common walks of life, without regard to changes in educational fashions. Feathers and finery you do not need. Do not waste your time in striving after the impossible. You cannot, however hard you may try, educate beyond the barriers fixed by nature and surrounding circumstances. You will find some slow scholars, and some dull ones; some with strong latent powers, and others the reverse; some stubborn and others pliant, some good and others bad. If you are gifted with sound judgment and good common-sense, you will work on calmly, faithfully, hopefully, good-naturedly, disciplining the troublesome, taming the savage, bearing in mind that all the dull boys and careless girls will, somehow or other, grow up into better men and women than you dare hope for. Take comfort from the words that quaint old Thomas Fuller wrote two centuries ago:

"Wines, the stronger they be, the more lees they have when they are new. Many boys are muddy-headed till they be clarified with age; and such afterwards proved the best. Bristol diamonds are both bright and squared and pointed by nature, and yet are soft and worthless; whereas Orient ones in India are rough and rugged naturally. Hard, rugged, and dull natures in youth acquit themselves afterwards the jewels of the country; and therefore their dulness at first is to be borne with, if they be diligent. The schoolmaster deserves to be beaten himself who beats nature in a boy for a fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world can make their parts who are naturally sluggish rise one minute before the hour nature hath appointed. All the whetting in the world can never set a razor's edge on that which hath no steel in it."

Add this consolatory statement by Emerson: "Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes down a tree-full of gnarled, wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen dessert apples."

IV. MINOR MATTERS.

The arrangement and length of recitations are matters of judgment to be modified according to conditions. When one class is reciting, set the others about some specific piece of work at their desks. The very youngest children should have two short reading and spelling lessons daily; the middle classes one lesson, and the highest class two lessons, a week. It is poor economy to hear your advanced classes recite daily lessons in all their studies. The few advanced pupils ought not to monopolize your attention. Assign all your older pupils good solid lessons to be learned at home; for children who attend school only a part of the year cannot easily be overtaxed with brain - work. Train them to depend upon themselves, and to find out things by hard thinking. In recitations, your explanations and illustrations must be condensed, for your time is limited. It is one of the defects of graded city schools that teachers talk too much and do most of the thinking for their pupils. Country scholars who enter the city high-school generally come out ahead because they have habits of self-reliance, and know how to learn from books.

Give the children under eight years of age long recesses for play; they ought not to be shut up in school more than two or three hours a day. In pleasant weather, after they read and spell, turn them out of doors.

When you take charge of a new school, adopt, at first,

the classification and order of exercises of your predecessor; if changes are needed, make them by degrees after you know the needs of the school. Beware of turning your pupils back to the "beginning of the book," as if you took it for granted they knew nothing at all. Rather, let them go on, and review when necessary. Still, if you happen to find a set of scholars taught by unskilled "school-keepers," you must act on this axiom from the great German educator Niemeyer, "Pupils who have been injured by wrong modes of instruction, and by an injurious multiplicity of studies, must be taught in almost all the elementary branches as if they were beginners."

On the morning of the first day, that crucial test of the teacher, introduce yourself by a few good-natured remarks, distribute slips of paper on which the scholars are to write their names, age, class, and studies, and, having collected these, proceed at once to business by giving out a sheet of paper to all who can use a pen, and requiring them to write a composition about their last vacation. This will keep them at work an hour at least, during which time you can attend to the little ones, and make out your rough programme. The art of the first day is to keep your scholars busy. You will avoid much mischief by getting everybody hard at work in ten minutes after school opens. If you know how to tell a good story, close school with one; if not, read one from some book.

Make no reflections on the former teacher, and allow none to be made by your scholars. If the people of your district are old-fashioned, introduce normal-school methods by degrees after you have won over your pupils. Be careful of what you say; any inadvertent remark made