kept determinedly at it, more than she had ever done before. Do you find what I am telling you very stupid?"

The narrator paused suddenly, but I somewhat hastily assured her that I was listening most carefully.

"Because," she said, "I don't see how I can tell you any shorter. Anyway, one day she heard that he was coming back quite unexpectedly. Of course she was greatly excited. Then she knew that he was in town. You can imagine how she felt, for now she knew that she loved him. She thought that he must come to see her at once, and he did-almost. ThenI don't exactly know how to tell you so that you will understand."

I murmured that she had better tell me the story in her own way, and that I would try to supply a sufficient amount of comprehension.

"It was the autumn," my visitress resumed, "when he came back, and already the afternoons were getting very short. She was sitting in her library when he came. It was a dull, rainy day, so that there was a fire in the grate. The flames were burning low, and it was all very dark and still. As he entered the room she could hardly speak, because of all that she was feeling. He came forward and shook hands with her, and she hoped that he would not notice how she was trembling. He sat down and began to talk. He told her how glad he was to be back, and asked her about her life and occupations, and she asked him short, nervous little questions about Africa. Then they fell into discussion about the people in the place, and the changes, and what was going on. Finally he got up and held out his hand. 'I am going to be here now,' he said, and it will be so very nice seeing you again. We have been friends so long, and there is no one like an old friend.' She murmured something, and then he went out of the room, and-that was all."

"I suppose," she said, "that you wonder how Aunty Margaret came to know. Well, perhaps I ought not to tell you, but, you see, Aunty Margaret married Stephen."

Then I asked lamely why I had been. told all this.

"Why," she exclaimed, "have you forgotten? It was about Harry and myself, and whether you believed that my wanting to follow my own ideas could come between us in that way—and what I ought to do."

I started up somewhat abruptly, murmuring a number of things, and among others speaking of useless absurdities.

"But," ," she remonstrated, "I am not a child, and I will not be called a child, and you must not call me one."

And then it was that I delivered an address to my gentle hearer that I am sure astonished her, and I think rather shocked her by its fierce vehemence. I do not remember exactly what I said, but I made Harry" as much of a feature as ever she had done, and ended by telling her to forget everything else but "Harry," and to go and be happy in her own useless, foolish fashion.

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"Why," she said, looking at me with wide-open eyes in startled wonder, "Miss Selwyn, how-strange you are to-day!"

I laughed at that in a way that I know made her think me stranger still, as I drew her to the door and almost forced her out-fairly thrusting her from the room, and locking myself in when I was alone.

Strange! I wonder if I was strange? But then all had come from a clear sky. This was my own story she had been telling, and it was I who had loved-Stephen.

N

O one can live long in one of our large towns or cities without becoming conscious of a somewhat pitiful nudity of interest in the lives of most of the comfortably dressed, comfortably fed, comfortably housed people who throng its public places. Only infrequently a face or voice betrays the inward serenity that comes from experiencing fulness of life. The majority measure all values by the standard of cost in money, have no genuine appreciation of art or literature, and seem sad because they are sadly in need of something interesting to think about.

Middle-class life the world over, perhaps, is a bit dull, but middle-class life in America, peculiarly unassuaged as it is by picturesque or mitigating features, must smite with a correspondingly peculiar pity the casual observer of its dulness. Of conversation as an art it has no knowledge. Conversation, furthermore, is beyond its powers, for conversation requires ideas, and of these it is as guiltless as are said to be those multimillionaires concerning whom it so delights to gather anecdote. Spontaneous fun is equally foreign to its nature. The Latin and Celtic elements in our national mixing-pot are too slight as yet or too near the bottom of the mixture to have affected the prevailing Teutonic phlegm. Our middle class, jesting indifferently, however often, jests almost never with grace and abandon. Nor, by way of compensation, does it know the joys of hero worship. Your Great Unwashed is by nature idealistic, and your man of sound culture cannot live without his leaders, but the of woλλo of which I speak is too intelligent, so it would tell you, to be hoodwinked by appearances: is not one man, by the Constitution, as good as any other, and shall the independent citizen, forsooth, humble himself before any one-saving always, for purposes of business, the maker of the market? In

dividuality is the right, almost the duty, of every American capable of its development. Yet, under the pressure of a vast and comparatively sudden material expansion, great numbers of our people for over a generation have been living under conditions that do not contribute to that development. On the one hand, they have lost the cultivating influences that accompanied a simpler life in less crowded surroundings, and on the other they have acquired new notions of success, and have become yoked beneath such a weight of gold-bedizened ideals as might well crush the mightiest and the meanest to one level of indistinction. How the millionaire gains his money and what he does with it are of small account in comparison with the effect produced by his millions on the minds and eyes of dazzled lookerson. To the men who know literature only through as many morning and evening papers as they can afford to buy or may be lucky enough to borrow, who know humor only as manifested in contemporary vaudeville, and drama only as provided by the contemporary manager, who care little for fiction, who have never read history ("Who was this Josephine?" one of them inquired, when the recent misfortunes of her birthplace had brought the name of the Empress of the French into the penny papers), and whose names, even, mentioned on the same page with poetry, must be blotted as a profanation, leisure offers no solace more intellectual than the contemplation of business; to the women who are their mates it affords opportunity only for the creation or the nourishment of discontent.

To devise the means of creating in the children of such parents a desire for culture, to furnish them with the keys wherewith they may unlock the doors of a far wider and deeper personal life than has been known to most adults of the passing generation, to arm them with the only weapons which can render them

victors in the ever-recurrent struggle with materialism, to give thought and so create a hunger for thought, to give a sense for form and so create the desire for form-these are among the delicate and difficult tasks committed to the public schools, and especially to the teachers of English in the public schools.

To children seriously handicapped in life's race by grinding poverty there may be a valuable stimulus in the homespun stories anent Franklin's penny roll and Lincoln's rail-splitting, but the prosperous young persons we are now considering need rather to be stirred in early childhood with the tales on which the ages have grown cultured-to become hero-worshippers of Achilles and Odysseus and Siegfried and King Arthur, to live in worlds in which the dollar neither bought nor measured anything worth having. They need to be set reading the old, old classic books that "everybody knows"-Alice in Wonderland, Lear's Nonsense Book, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family, Tom Brown at Rugby, Grimm, Andersen, and the Arabian Nights. Test the first five children you run across on a list as fundamental as this, and the results may startle you. Even the commonest legends of our fathers have ceased to be current among children, parents having abandoned for the most part the gentle art of story-telling, and much that should be a choice heritage of culture and delight to every well-reared child is being relegated to the mere student of folk-lore. Mothers, meantime, devise ever-increasingly elaborate apparel for their offspring, and fathers dive ever deeper into those inspired sources of wit and wisdom the daily newspapers. These be thy gods, O Israel! Truly the public school and the public library, united, seem but a small David to go forth against so mighty a Goliath. Yet when one considers the immense influence in formation of taste, in widening of ideas, in the creation of elasticity of outlook, so few books even as those mentioned above may exert, one may well take heart of grace and go forward. The young American hears too often only a cheap and bastard wit, no true kin to fun; let us start him early with The Rose and the Ring, and the Peterkin Papers, and the old-world caustic wisdom of Esop. By

sixteen, often, he has imbibed an equally cheap contempt for enthusiasms; when he is much younger, then, let us entice his ear with that music of certain heroic names and deeds which, once keenly felt, will cease not at intervals through all his life to echo at once as a remembrance and a challenge. His outlook upon the world tending to be provincial and inelastic, his conversation suffers from a lack of ideas. It will cease to suffer so if he comes to live each day for a little space in unfamiliar times or countries, to follow the life and interests of Mowgli or of King Richard as eagerly as he follows his own, to learn slowly the great lesson of unity beneath diversity taught by all history and all literature.

What must be the qualifications of the teacher who is to accomplish such results? Most important of any is a deep personal feeling for literature. Scarcely less important is the sympathetic power that will enable her to communicate her enthusiasms. She must love the very syllables of the tale of Troy, and she must love all in her pupils to which that tale will appeal, if she is to give them the thrill its telling should rightfully awaken. Such love and such sympathy are not to be had for the mere asking. Rare enough, to begin with, they are the fruit of refined conditions, of long training, of special cultivation. Their exercise involves a physical and spiritual drain which necessitates frequent repairing. The life of a teacher is often somewhat isolated; her opportunities for association with congenial people are limited. Those communities do well which recognize this, and by raising the standard of salaries make it possible for her to travel, to purchase books, to hear the best music and the few great actors and actresses. For the teacher of English in particular there is always the danger that, exhausted by the drudgery of her work, she will sink into an uninspiring routine. Her own interest in life must be fresh and strong, her own sense of the fulness of life unabated, if her pupils, led joyously into the realms of literature, are to grow eager under a sense of that strength and fulness.

To many of these pupils their teachers are the sole representatives of a life in which thought ranks higher than sensa

tion, character than money, cultivation than display. Through their teachers alone does there seem to be any chance of their laying hold of sound principles of value. The dress and manner of the teacher may be furnishing a standard of fitness quite as important as that established by her speech or her information. The young person who forbade her pupils to recognize her on the street because she did not wish passers-by to divine her vocation represents a class of women-comparatively innumerous, it is to be hoped-whose capacity for harm seems in inverse proportion to their weight. The whole matter of the selection of teachers for the lower grades is one of extreme difficulty and delicacy, bound up as it is with the high-school and training-school systems. The desirable tastes and breadth of culture must be lacking in many girls whose ambition, or the ambition of whose parents for a better social position and higher grade of work, leads to the successful prosecution of a high-school and training or normal school course. It is difficult to deny to such the fruit of their labors. The practice of specializing the English teaching even in the lowest grades might render their presence least injurious.

Theory and experience alike justify one definite enunciation: Only young women who have read, who know how to read, who like to read, and who from day to day find it necessary, for their souls' comfort, to read, should be allowed to teach English. No second-rate information as to who wrote what, and when and where he lived and died, will answer. Each instructor must herself have scaled the walls of heaven. Her reed, then, however tiny, will transmit the real fire. Only the genuine lover can arouse a genuine love.

Long ago the rewards that come to the cultivator of books were painted by Sydney Smith in colors none too glowing, for his words have stood the test of time: "Well and happily has that man

...

conducted his understanding who has learned to derive from the exercise of it regular occupation and rational delight; . . . . there are many consolations in the mind of such a man which no common life can ever afford, and many enjoyments which it has not to give! . . . It is worth while in the days of our youth to strive hard for this great discipline; to pass sleepless nights for it; to give up to it laborious days; to spurn for it present pleasure; to endure for it afflicting poverty; to wade for it through darkness and sorrow and contempt, as the great spirits of the world have done in all ages and all times."

In countless cases the aspiration for this discipline and for the fulness of individual development it gives might be substituted, wisely, and with no great difficulty, for the traditional aim of the ambitious American youth-political notoriety or the acquisition of great wealth. wealth. Comparatively few boys out of a whole generation have the gifts or the opportunity to become millionaires, governors, or senators. Most of them, with encouragement, may acquire a measurable and pleasurable degree of personal cultivation.

In 1849, at the death of another Smith,-Horace, this one, a London broker, who had retired early from business, and had spent thirty years in the enjoyment of society and belles-lettres,— there appeared this appreciation in the Examiner: "He was a man of correct taste and the most generous sympathies, a cheerful and wise companion and a fast friend."

It is men and women of correct taste, cheerful and wise companions, of whom every-day life in America stands most sorely in need. It is in the increase of such that we may look for the remedy for some of the most annoying social evils with which we are afflicted. It is to the development of such that no small part of the energy of teachers in public schools may be most profitably directed.