pedagogical firmament, and be esteemed as the noblest of men, who, out of a preponderating and ineradicable modesty, had published their most important effusions under the mystifying concealment of a nom de guerre, which was no longer known, but which was supposed to consist of three letters of the alphabet. It was matter of dispute with competent scholars whether these letters were the first, middle, or last rounds of that ladder by which youth in distant and cloudy ages had climbed into the heaven of learning. There were as excellent reasons for the one as for the other suppositions and students were now inclined to leave this important subject in the unsettled condition in which the illustrious authors plainly designed to leave it; their wishes were to be scrupulously complied with; their invaluable writings had descended to these latter generations by the most unexpected channels, and a due consideration of the worth of these effusions was a small return to their unknown inspirers. After having been lost for over a century, their recovery and preservation made a story, that, in its leading incidents, savored of the miraculous; the details of this wonderful history were not, perhaps, as fully substantiated as was desirable, but the wildest scepticism had failed to shake the central and decisive facts. An adequate statement of the principal events attending the restoration to use and light of so much buried wisdom could be found in the school library where was also to be seen a vast number of volumes containing the original papers with the elaborate commentary demanded by their abstruse nature. On the surface these compositions seemed letters written to forgotten magazines or papers, being addressed to Mr. Editor, and to be full of ill-natured and frivolous allusions to persons, who are now known to have been honorable leaders in their profession, and in every way admirable examples of what was generous in citizenship and useful in private station. The writings had, superficially again, a prevailingly flippant and would-be-brilliant tone; certainly as specimens of wit or mere exterior brightness they were unmitigated failures; but after continued and exhaustive criticism they had been found to be effusions of an esoteric character, and contained in their self-sacrificing brevity and concision the completest summary of educational principles in the world. So profound were they now believed to be, so full of the substance of the highest verity, so brimming over with the gentlest and kindest spirit of humanity, that no praise,

no reverence, was too great for them. Notwithstanding the strength of the evidence which supports the conclusions given above, a few critics, with an audacity not to be commended, have assailed both the manner and matter of these famous articles; they have declared them to be ridiculous in style and unworthy of attention in respect of their significance, or want of it, as they unblushingly aver; they have perused mouldering and untrustworthy records and boldly affirm that in their own time they were regarded as the products of men of the slenderest attainments, who were never credited with the possession of very clear ideas, and who were even accused of an extraordinary unfamiliarity with the only language in which they dabbled. The thought of the letters is solely valuable, to be sure, in so far as we dig below the surface and reach the mines of untold wealth hidden from all but the most patient seekers; the style is perhaps susceptible of emendation, but it smacks, so to speak, of the soil, and displays the vivacity of intense conviction and absolute adherence to the truth.

High and revered composite! what would we not give to see the earthly and fleshly habiliments in which your intellectual splendor revealed itself? Like all the just and noble, you were too far in advance of your time to be appreciated at your full worth! In the majestic public square of the new City of the Commonwealth, a suitable monument has been erected to you on which is inscribed all that is in our power to place there: To the Great Unknown, to the Algebraic, to the Unsolved Equation.

I now proceeded to another class and found the children engaged in a Literature Lesson. The Literature Lesson is supposed to be an inseparable accompaniment of the Observation Lesson. The reason of this close connection is perhaps somewhat recondite, and I confess that my comprehension of the subject as unfolded to me was not altogether as complete as I could wish, but literature, it appears, is the counterpart of science, the one arouses the senses. inwardly, the other outwardly; the one accommodates the infantile mind to the realities of the world in which he dwells, the other habituates him to those fantastical and largely incongruous playings about reality, with which all literatures teem, and which, though in the strictest sense mere irrational futilities, have yet such a hold on the race as to require a certain kind of surreptitious induction into them. Scientifically speaking, literature has no right to be; how it came to be was a curious inquiry into the

mode and method of human vagary; it still clung to mankind like the last remnant of the marble around the almost completed statue; but was rapidly falling into innocuous desuetude, and would leave the naked and sinewy form of science at last in its barrenness and flowerlessness as the ultimate evolution of all time. It was taught in the schools, to be sure, but merely as subsidiary to the scientific completion of the senses, for we must on no account lose sight of the paramount and triumphant fact that mind is only sense, and that thought as such is only nonsense.

The children, who sat in rapt devotion at the feet of the literature teacher, were of the same tender age as the human blossoms who had been bedewed with the grateful and growth-compelling waters of prehistoric reminiscence. The teacher, a lady of uncertain years, with great masses of blonde and artistically dishevelled hair flowing in admirable confusion about a forehead white and strong, and gracefully playing about two tiny, shell-like ears, had a certain sybilline aspect, as if communing with a realm inward and superior to the vulgar one of time and sense. Her voice had a far-off ring like delicate echoes among vine-clad rocks, or the sound of falling waters heard at midnight under the silent stars. I was again so unfortunate as not to hear the earlier portion of the exercise, and the sentences which the children had given were already on the blackboard. The poem selected was Longfellow's beautiful and suggestive "Ladder of Saint Augustine." The exquisitely modulated lines had been read to the class, for it must not be forgotten that not one of these children could read in the full sense of the term, and afterward had been subjected by them to a process of adequate and far-reaching criticism and elucidation. The result of their excogitations was before me, and was to the following purport:

"Saint Augustine was the most illustrious Father of the Church. The Mother of the Church is unknown."

This last sentence, the teacher archly remarked, was allowed to stand on account of its childish sincerity and naiveté.

"The Church is an ecclesiastical establishment for the propagation of the truth in the form of a theology.

The Ladder of Saint Augustine extends into the sky.

The rounds of the Ladder are our deviations from the law of rectitude.

By stepping on our ingrained selfishness we rise into more etherial altitudes.

Our rising signifies our remorse for our many misdeeds.
The physiological habitat of remorse is the cerebrum.

All our emotions have physical equivalents in the tissues of the brain.

Longfellow was so called because he had very long legs.

There is an insect called Daddy Long Legs, or Satan's Darning Needle."1

I ventured to point out to the teacher the incorrectness of associating the appearance of the poet with an etymologic interpretation of his name, but she at once sent to the library and demonstrated to me from a dozen distinguished historians, whose names of course were entirely new to me, that the statement was beyond dispute. I had nothing further to say, and felt that the unsuspected and not-to-be-believed was the sole safe anchorage in the tumultuous sea of warring opinions and contending matters-offact.

The grandiose periods given above were read by these infant prodigies with a fluency and appreciation that renders all attempt at description vain and useless. The teacher smiled in a semivacant and abstracted way at my expressions of surprise and pleasure, but assured me with a sudden flash of fervor that transformed her into a new being that she should not be satisfied until the elegant demonstrations of the Differential Calculus could be employed in her classes, a privilege which she had long sought, and which the advanced educational authorities agreed with her in judging the most wholesome pabulum of crescent minds, but which could not be introduced until a supply of teachers competent to the instruction could be procured. Unhappily this was not yet possible; however, she had received a call to teach in a distant city, and had been promised that no restrictions whatever would be placed upon her manner of procedure. Her departure was delayed by the circumstance that no one had yet been discovered to fill the abysmal vacancy made by her defection (here one

1 This is not entirely true; but it appears that the facts of science are relatively unimportant, the sharpening of the power of observation being the main point (unto what end save to observe facts not seeming entirely clear), and the habituation to the scientific mode of investigation taking precedence of all else. Indeed, it is best to sweep facts away immediately after use to avoid overloading the memory with unimportant details. That facts are essentially faculty, and that without them no safe progress can be made is true, but it is pleasanter to skip about in vacuo, and the school must above all be made cheerful and attractive. No teacher worthy the name, alive to the scientific ideal, would fail to use a sentence that was bright and "cute" simply for the reason that it contained an unverifiable or incorrect statement.

of her sad, softly luminous smiles), and her scrupulous devotion to her chosen task forbade her abandonment of labors begun with no immediate chance of their successful prosecution by another.

I felt myself lifted into a finer atmosphere; visions of illimitable achievement floated before me; with such beginnings what might not be ultimately attained? Nature could withhold no secrets from seekers gifted with such acuteness of sense, and such fire of enthusiasm. The high and generous fervor acquired under the inspiration of such teaching could not fade into the dull striving of the ignoble and pitful drudge, spurred by the task-master, need, into a semblance of activity, which was as like this impassioned determination as the silver shinings of the stars were to the feeble flickerings of an expiring taper.

I was next shown some original compositions of the pupils whom I had seen in the Observation Lesson. If a collection of Pindaric odes or Shakespearian tragedies had been brought to me, I should no longer have been astonished, for I had now become so thoroughly accustomed to the marvellous that anything short of the unimaginable would have evoked the greater wonderment. The compositions were brief and written with a neatness that spoke bravely in praise of the care and patience of the teacher. They were charmingly illustrated in colors, and resembled mediæ val illuminated missals in the richness of their many-tinted borders and gorgeous pictures. I turned them over with a deep and admiring interest and felt the tears coming into my eyes at the touches of pathos mingling naturally with the genuine simplicity of the thought and expression. They had all the dewy freshness which belongs to the earliest literature of a nation, and whose elusive grace not all the subsequent elaboration of the highest artistry is able to reach or reproduce. Two of these compositions are transcribed below. The first relates to Whittier's "Barefoot Boy." The text was encircled by a border of that loveliest of New England flowers, the trailing arbutus, painted with minute finish. and singular spontaneity. Bees, golden as the mellow sunshine, and butterflies, freckled with hues dipped in the glow and flame of morning skies, buzzed and floated irregularly around the page. At the top, the barefoot boy stood smiling beneath the trees, youth in all its delight and innocence, a part of the summer that waved in the breeze-touched branches overhead, and swayed in the joyous grasses at his feet.