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I stopped, and said, "What are you all drinking so industriously?"

The teacher answered, "Water."

"Well, why drink it that way?" I inquired.

The teacher replied, “We have no well here, and no spring inside of a mile; so everybody brings a bottle of water from home in the morning, and whiskey bottles are the biggest we can get."

Some time ago we proposed to consolidate the schools in one of our rural districts. We ordered seven small schools to be closed, hired three wagons to move along the highways and take the children to school, enlarged one of the buildings to accommodate a hundred children, and had a fine programme laid out. It should have been successful, but it came to grief, because every man wanted to do the "hauling." After the contract was given out, one man said he was not going to trust his children behind "them old runaway mules"; another complained of the driver, who was accused of taking a nip on a cold day; and a third objected to the wagon. The result was that everybody refused to be hauled, and the wagons went back and forth almost empty for a month. The men who had the contract for a dollar a day to drive the wagons hauled nobody but their own children. They were content, but they alone. A petition with many signatures came up before the Board of Education, and the committee which was appointed to go over the whole matter declared that consolidation was a good thing, but that it did not work. So the wagons were dismissed, the little schools were reopened, and the district is now drifting along sleepily, with its seven separate groups of twenty to twenty-five children,

scattered about five miles apart. The plan may have been badly managed, but I feel sure it was in advance of the times. Our people had not grown up to it.

Among the delightful traditions of the country school are the closing exercises, or "commencement," as it is called. This is one of the demands made upon the schools by the rural population that cannot be refused. The terrible monotony of country life seeks this dissipation, and the community for ten miles around gives itself up to it. Preparations are made a month in advance; and when the time comes, every child in school appears several times on the programme, and the exercises last all night.

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On one occasion I was asked to 'come out to the closing" of one of the best country schools I know of, twenty-five miles from town. The last five miles I went in a buggy that was sent to meet me. After an early supper at a neighbor's, I walked to the schoolhouse near by, and found that the schoolroom itself was to be used as a dressing-room, the piazza had been enlarged for a stage, and the audience was seated in the open air, on rough boards laid across felled trees in front of the school. Blazing pine fires on stands served for light. An audience of several hundred had arrived from many miles around, driving in all sorts of vehicles, which gradually closed in on the area devoted to the exercises, until it was almost impossible to get through the packed mass of horses, mules, buggies, and wagons. There were dogs and babies in abundance. The night was as soft as a June night in the South can be. The stars were bright above, and the pine forest made a deep black curtain behind the blazing red fires that lit the grounds. The

stage, bright with lamps and Japanese lanterns, and decorated with pine boughs and bamboo vines, fitted its setting admirably. The effect of night and space was heightened, as the exercises went on, by an occasional wail from an uncomfortable baby, a fight among the numerous dogs, or a kicking fit of a suspicious mule. There were forty numbers on the programme, and the exercises began promptly at nine o'clock. The children did their part well, the speeches were good, the songs were sweet, and the drills were interesting. The teacher had paid for nearly all the costumes, selected all the pieces, drilled the children, and staked her reputation on the success of the performance. It is pleasant to be able to say that the occasion was a memorable one, and the exhausted young teacher had reason to be proud of her triumph.

The hours of the night wore slowly on. I was the guest of honor, and could not move out of my conspicuous position; so with patient impartiality I laughed at everything and applauded everybody for five laborious hours. The programme came to an end at half-past two by my watch. As the crowd was dispersing, I asked one of the young men who had come in wagons with their best girls, how far he expected to drive. "Ten miles," he answered; and added, "then get breakfast and go to ploughing."

MIANTOWONA

BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

LONG ere the Pale Face

Crossed the Great Water,
Miantowona

Passed, with her beauty,

Into a legend,

Pure as a wild-flower

Found in a broken

Ledge by the sea-side.

Let us revere them -
These wildwood legends,
Born of the camp-fire!
Let them be handed
Down to our children
Richest of heirlooms!

No land may claim them:

They are ours only,

Like our grand rivers,

Like our vast prairies,

Like our dead heroes!

In the pine-forest,
Guarded by shadows,
Lieth the haunted
Pond of the Red Men.
Ringed by the emerald
Mountains, it lies there,

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