women would preserve for themselves.

And yet, sometimes we keep our children so primmed up and pursed up, that it makes me think of the old rhyme:

Wash me, and dress me and lay me on a bank to dry,

So that I may look my prettiest when people come by."

In our homes we maintain the quiet of work, and I don't see why we should not hold the school-room as sacred as the street in front of our house. In one of the schools in Massachusetts, if one child and the teacher have an antagonism of will, there is a scene of contest which is demoralizing to the pupils and distracting to the work for which the school was organized, and while that is progressing a struggle goes on which is beneath the level of civilized life. It seems to me that the community should protect the teacher in her right to a quiet school-room. Where any antagonism of will occurs the child should simply be allowed to go home. He must leave the school-room, if he does not fall in line. He should no more be allowed to fall out of the line of work, and remain in the school, than should a man in the line of battle. Then if he should be sent back through the influence of the school board, he should be put through a judicious discipline. He will come back ready to do his work and glad to do it. It seems to me disturbance should never enter a school-room. After a large experience in a great variety of schools, I do not think that antagonisms are at all necessary in schoolrooms. Then when we come to methods, a very good method is to use every means we can to simplify our work, so that by the shortest possible route we may come to the end desired. There is no reason why we could not learn delightful things in regard to a country which is not our own, without the aid of a book, even though it is called a geography, if the facts are pleasantly presented. I think I may say that ninety-nine out of every hundred parents of this day have a prejudice in favor of getting everything out of a book. If we can learn from Nature direct why should we necessarily care to take these same facts repeated in a book. As far as possible the

child wants a living teacher, and I am sure that any knowledge of Nature which is to be learned from actual contact with her is always fascinating to a child. I remember they said that when Prot. Agassiz went to South America, it was not half as important to him that all the professors in that part of the world held out to him a welcoming hand, as the fact that the boys found it out. They brought him animals and plants and insects and seeds unknown to him, and he welcomed gladly everything they brought. He was never seen in the street without a train of boys at his heels. He had drunk deeper of Nature's fountain than they, and all their little contributions he accepted with eagerness. I think all teachers should have just such a fountain of inspiration, and yet we cling to the old ways of doing things, and if some teacher comes as a champion cf this new method, she gets a stare of wonder and no sympathy. We are beginning to consider the question of industrial training, learning that the hands have something to do as well as the head. I think if I should say anything of my early teaching, if anything was a drawback in it, it was the fact that I had nothing to do with my hands. Just consider that when we go to school as little children and come out at sixteen or twenty, we might almost say, save for the making of a few figures on the blackboard, we have had our hands tied up. We have not been learning to train our bodies. We do so much reading, and learn so much geography, and so many columns of words, many of which we do not know the meaning of at all, that we neglect the education of our bodies and hands. The day before I came here I visited a school and listened to one of those spellings of columns of words, of which you have heard, and one of them I did not recognize, it was the word "duelled." I said to the teacher, "I do not recognize the word." She said, "Yes, it is all right." I looked down the column of words to see what it meant and I did not find it at all. Then she said, "The word 'duel' is there and we are told you will notice, at the top of the page, to give these words also with the endings ing and ed," and so

from the word "duel" she had not only made the word "duelling," but the word "duelled." The idea seems to prevail that the child has a long period in its youth, when it has not much of anything to do, and is like a great cistern of emptiness, that you may pack with all the rubbish you like to, and by and by there will come a time when looking for something wanted, these old stores will be brought out. I was looking over a reading-book which a gentleman wished to have introduced into the school, and I came across "Gems of Thought," and the little child who knew what "gems of thought" meant I said would be a little prig. I don't suppose a child ever puts his hands on his heart and apostrophizes truth and wants to wear a crown. He does not want to do anything of the sort. "Well," said the gentleman, "don't you think it would be well to be able to recall these things after a while, even if they are not understood at first ?" Then, I said, "Well, the difference between you and me is that you like salt junk and I like fresh meat." There is never a time in a child's life when a world of information is not needed. The child comes into the world and knows nothing, but does not hear as much with its ears as we do. It should be taught according to its needs, and its physical powers need to be educated just as well as its intellectual powers. There is a world all around it, from which it wants to draw a great deal; and let us remember that there is no time for slighting this duty by making it carry what to it would be always useless. The children, in many of the schools I go into, seem to be suffering from wearing a mental hat, just like their fathers, and do you wonder that such children grow indifferent and say, as the little boy said when asked if he went to school, "Yes." "What do you do at school?" He did not answer very readily. "Do you study geography?" No, sir." "Do you learn to read?" "No." "Do you learn this, that and the other?" "No." "What do you learn, what do you do?" "Wait for it to come time to go home." I do not blame the children. Now, in the Kindergarten, the child is recognized as the centre,

not the teacher; the child is growing and the teacher cannot be too careful in watching the bud as it develops. She takes the child in its natural order of development. So I think we have a great field to learn from in the Kindergarten. In a speech made by one of our great educators, he recurred three times. to the enjoyment which he experienced in going through his Kindergarten as a place in which he learned so much that was good and useful. If a mature and thoughtful and wise man can learn so much in a Kindergarten, what gratitude a little child must feel for the service of such a method! I began to speak a word for industrial training. I chanced a while since to go down into the lower part of Boston, among the poor tenement houses and into one of those buildings which somehow or other seem to be Christian all through from the roof way down to the basement. Somebody was always doing something for somebody, and the poor tenement women were relieved of the care of their children for some hours each day, by others who kept them until their mothers claimed them again; and the poor women, who did not know how to get their living even by washing, were taught to wash so that they could earn their living the better. I went into the industrial room where the boys were being taught to use hammer and file, and where they were taught the elements of carpentry. There were other rooms where girls were taught to mend and sew. So eager were they all for this practical work that they rushed in at noon and came before school was opened to learn what was to be taught them by experienced people. I was there a year or two ago, and I said then, "Some day the rich men of the Back Bay, the wealthy part of Boston, will be wishing their boys could have the chance that these poor tenement lads are now having." And I believe there is an experiment of this kind. being made in the quarters of the poor rich people, for it is a common mistake to think that rich people are rich all the way through. So long as their boys don't have a chance of using the talents which were given them for their life work, they are not having the chance the boys at the North End are get

ting. I was interested to see with what quickness these children were picking up their work. I one day met a lady in Wisconsin, who was speaking about training our children, and I said, "It is a shame that we are not being trained in our schools industrially. I think our girls might be trained how to use large tools, the hammer, saw, and file, and it is a shame that our boys are not taught to use the needle. I do not know why they should not be taught to darn their stockings or mend their clothes, and I wish that instead of doing so much intellectual work in school I could have learned to use my fingers." She said, "I was very fortunate in learning to do all that; come to my house and I will show you what good times my boys and 1 have, doing mechanical work." I said, "To one so wise as you are I am quite ashamed to confess that it was only a little while ago that I learned to set a nail into a board without splitting it; that to accomplish that it must be set in a certain way." "Must it?" was her reply. She professed to know all about these things but she did not. I have been very glad to see that in the Normal Schools of Massachusetts they haye introduced the use of tools. In visiting one of them, I said to the Principal, "Have the girls been successful in the use of tools?" He said, "Yes, indeed. If we are in need of a stage, the young ladies are perfectly competent to make it." And I have a firm belief that there is a way of securing this practical knowledge without robbing them of their intellectual training. I want to say a word more in regard to the moral training of our schools. I think that all I have said is indirectly in the line of moral training.

I feel a lack in many schools that I know of a lack of a certain moral veracity which has been the root of much harm. When to a pupil after he has been six months under any teacher no sense of shame is possible there is something lacking in the teacher. There are teachers who carry with them that which makes every pupil feel that a deceit recoils upon himself. I think the sort of intellectual work that most teachers do, is in the line of moral work. I not only want a