sponds to the voice of reason. And among the sweetest, the most genuine pleasures of these later years, I count the thanks, sometimes mingled with regrets, of the troublous, bothersome boys of old.

And of the eight or ten whom I would recall as the phenomenally bad boys of school, I do not know of one who is not to-day a useful and respected citizen, though some of them drew upon our stock of patience and forbearance to the very verge of bankruptcy.

There are those, I am aware, to whom all this is a dead language; who, at the suggestion of kindness, understand weakness, and for politeness imagine only a sickly sentimentality, ever ready with the reply that they could be easy, as well as any one, in not correcting faults, or insisting upon good lessons, their very excuses showing an utter want of apprehension of what is intended. I would abate no jot of any healthful requirement, but only ask for a prompter because a willing obedience; and more thorough preparation, because a work of the heart. as well as the head.

A command may be in order in the prison or the barracks, but in the school, as in the family, never, except as a kind of punishment. At the stern order to "take my hand out of my pocket," what a strange yearning ran tingling down to the very ends of my fingers, till the blood seemed to settle under the nails-an inextinguishable yearning for the bottom of that pocket!

You have no time, you say, amid the press of school duties, to waste on mere forms of polite phraseology? What! no time to be a lady or a gentleman? Then you have no place in the teacher's chair, whose occupant should never be aught else.

And when all efforts prove futile, and the benefit to the pupil becomes hopelessly incommensurate with the

harm his presence brings upon the school, let him be becomingly remitted to the care of his legal and responsible guardian, to whose natural or parental instincts we may assume, as the law has done, the charge may be more safely confided. In the school-room, and within his own domain, the teacher stands in his own right, and will wisely omit those functions which only, as installed in loco parentis, he is allowed to exercise.

I am aware of the heresy, to some minds, of these views, but am trying to present what seems to me the only true basis for the teacher's authority—that his powers inhere of right in his office, whatever dicta to the contrary may be burrowed from among the dusty decisions of forgotten judges. We need not that any parentis locus should be assigned us by the hocus-pocus of legal or judicial legerdemain, nor would we extend the limits of our domain beyond their natural bounds. We believe that school-grounds are defined, as any other grounds, by their legal boundaries, and that if the unruly urchin breaks his neighbor's windows, or pilfers his peanut-stand, on the way to or from school, the sufferer should look to the parent for redress; and that, in case of accident or harm, the parent, and not the teacher, should employ the physician and pay the nurse. But we also believe that whatever exerts a baneful influence upon the school, or serves to bring it into disrepute, whether done within the precincts of the school-yard, upon the neighbor's grounds, "or in the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon," comes under the legitimate cognizance of the teacher, who, in the jealous care of his charge, may counsel, censure, or condemn.

But why the school-grounds should extend to the father's door, rather than the home circle expand to the school entrance, is to us a mystery.

The parent is charged with the duty of providing clothing, food, shelter, and home-training, and is responsible to society for any neglect; and under a like responsibility is the teacher charged with his mental and moral training at school. The duties and the rights of the one, within his province, are as sacred and original, we apprehend, as the other.

What is to be gained by this assumption of another's part, which, by-the-way, is never urged, as we remember, except as involving the right to maul, maim, or manglea right that teachers or parents desirous of exercising it should be left to maintain with their best blows upon each other, with the children behind to prick and goad them on?

As to the proper treatment of specific cases, and, in truth, as to general management and instruction, there is no rigid, unvarying method suited to all individuals, or to the same individual at all times. But for those fitted by culture, character, and disposition to be teachers, within certain limits, on which all thoughtful experience agrees, their usefulness is largely increased by a large infusion of their own personality; and, we fancy, the weightiest charge that can be brought against normal schools is, that their pupils are so often charged and overcharged with the idea that theirs is the way, and the only way, and hence their unwillingness to adapt themselves to their situation and surroundings, impervious to the advice and counsels of their associates or superiors.

But, if there be one thing never to be lost sight of, it is that somehow the children should be interested in their work. The only point that Colonel Parker insists upon, and the one that makes the thought of school a delight to every parent's heart, is that the school shall be made pleasant to the children; that they may no longer "creep

like snail unwillingly to school," but that the subjects shall be so vivified and so presented that a necessary absence shall be a day of pleasure lost. Many a boy has doubtless been made a worthless if not a dangerous member of society by the irksomeness of his school-days.

It is not alone by enforced restraint that these little bundles of activities are to be brought into relations of harmony and usefulness. Not more eager for what is new were Paul's hearers on Mars Hill than they. Of quick discernment, of keen insight, and small respect for sham and pretense, they have not learned, as we, by long pupilage, to sit contented with teachings they do not understand, or to keep step to music not in unison with their young heart-beats.

Along the paths of learning, as well as in the world's highway, they do not follow kindly the straight and beaten track, but soon pull away from the hand that leads them, now picking berries by the road-side, now in the field with hat in hand, in full chase of some bright butterfly, and again bending down to paddle in the pebbly brook; and he is the wiser guide who, yielding somewhat to their wild humors, brings them in at the end, weary, it may be, but with many a little lesson learned and childish treasure garnered.

Kindly and wisely to gather up these wild and changing humors, and, without subduing the spirit or abating the ardor, to unite them in one grand earnest purpose of life, is not the work of a novice or a trained dullard.

Too often, I fear, we send forth even our best pupils with no aim beyond the diploma, no ambition but for the high mark, who, when the pressure of the class-room is lifted, float aimlessly out of the sparkling current of progress, like the bits of drift-wood that we see on the

scum-covered pool below the busy mill of our New England streams.

We, too, as teachers, need to keep ourselves in line and sympathy with the world's advance, and not, like Hamlet, with the ghost of some dead past forever rising before us, permit it to chill our warm impulse, and hold us back from all worldly endeavor and achievement.

We, too, need to join our strength and share our counsels with those of our own calling. We need to preserve so much of youth in our hearts as to find beauty and music in the floating butterfly and the babbling brook of boyhood.

There are leaders and teachers among us, whose spoken or written thought we may not ignore. There is, too, the poetry, the science, the philosophy, the art, the history, the romance of our own and other days around us that we may not neglect. And it may well be matter of astonishment how few are the fruits and flowers, from any of these sources, that may not be put to use in our daily work, in suggestion, in striking example, in apt illustration, in encouragement, in instruction.

And some such allurement is ofttimes required to draw us out of ourselves, to relieve that depression and weariness, that sinking of heart, that sometimes come on us, when the day's work is over, and we feel exhausted of our electric force by five hours' contact with threescore bristling fragments of humanity.

When all else fails, and "this whole round world seems flat, stale, and unprofitable," as a sure and safe resource there is nothing for health, strength, and recreation, like a good, reliable hobby. Though it be nothing rarer or more costly than moth-hunting, the jingle or jangle of rhymes, or even reformed spelling, they are, some of them, as I well know, of boundless possibilities.