where. Presuming you expect to work, allow an old friend to give a few hints which may aid you in your labors.

Make out your plans before you enter your school;—you may have to modify them, but you can do that, much easier, than you can go on without plan or modification; besides if you have a mark to work up to, you will work with more energy.

Prepare yourself specially for your planned work, by obtaining such maps, charts, text-books, blank-books, registers, and such information as you think you will need this summer. A teacher boarding around, does not have every opportunity of getting valuable information, beyond the predigrees of various families, therefore, in vacation arm and equip yourselves.

Many things can be taught better in summer than in winter, and it should be an object to teach things naturally. The teacher's plan ought to keep this principle in view. Thus Geography, Botany, and Geology are summer studies. Take your pupils into a field and try the object-lesson plan, show them a peninsula, island, cape, promontory, and an isthmus, and they will always remember the definition. Let them discover, and find the productions of a field, then of a farm, then a town, county, state. Let them take this natural course, even if there is no text-book to follow, and ask questions out of. After the children have exhausted all their knowledge, they will seize the books and newspapers readily enough. Let the children bring all kinds of plants to you, show them the distinction and varieties, orders and classes, and after every weed and herb has been submitted to your gaze and briefly explained to them, they will be prepared to hear and read of those in strange countries. Let them bring all of the different kinds of rocks and minerals; save a specimen of each kind, extemporize a cabinet, and build a play house of the refuse, then will you make every plant a lesson and each stone-fence a volume which your children will study and learn profitable lessons from, never to be forgotten. There are other summer studies, but I cannot mention more now.

Obtain some interesting book to read, that you may read aloud at your boarding places. It will make the parents respect and esteem you, and it will make the children think. you love learning, beyond the mere business of teaching it to them, love books for the sake of knowledge. You will find that it will do far more to elevate your profession, than the crochet and embroidery work, you usually spend your leisure hours upon.

Prepare yourself for disappointment. Let your plans be ever so good, and your aims ever so high and noble, you will seldom find a day passing without a "screw loose somewhere," in other words, your patience will be severely tried every day, but don't fret or grumble, it will only make matters worse. Children often break over the plainest rule innocently. As you say to them "try, try again," even so do you. Therefore expect trouble, that you may meet it pleasantly and bravely.

Lastly, be punctual the first morning. Get to school an hour before the children arrive if you can, and set the school room in order, that when the pupils arrive they will feel that they are guests, not the host. They will intuitively feel the distinction, nor forget it during the term. You know children often behave better away from home while visiting than at home.

APRIL, 1862.

DE CAY.

CHARACTER.

VISIT a number of schools and you will receive a different impression from each, for each is, so to speak, an individual, characterized by its own peculiar mental and moral qualities. Each bears its own distinguishing stamp, assigning it to a higher or lower position in the scale of rank, As the cloud and the sunshine cause a fluctuation on the barometric column, so there are circumstances which are sure to mark their influences on the public school. What are these circumstances? There are the social standing of parents, the pub

lic spirit and energy of the community as permanent causes, and which we may regard as regulating the periodical fluctuations. On the other haud the influence of teachers and textbooks as transitory causes, making in like manner the diurnal fluctuations. The latter only we shall consider and under the head of "Scholars as Imitators." The school teacher, the school visitor, the general observer of youth, has so often opportunity to take note of it, that one is apt to overlook the fact that children are great imitators and give it its proper attention in the great work of education. It is one of the revelations that Nature, the great guide and educator of the school-master himself, unfolds by the acts and words of the young in study and in play. Imitation was the instructor of the little child in making his first acquaintance with language, and he follows the same guide until he attains the mature age that inspires original action and thought.

At the school-boy age how inclined are scholars to follow the model from the copy in the writing book up to that in the teacher's desk. Of course we are looking at this trait of character and law of nature by itself, and are prepared to appreciate the objection-"How can the instructor turn out his minds educated, or on the right road to education with this. principle as his guiding light?" Says Webster, a man is educated when he can concentrate all his energies of thought on a single theme and hold them there.

The child has learned to talk when it has acquired a ready use of all the elementary sounds and the power of combining them in a sentence. Yet, before he can become master of either, Nature keeps him practising as an imitator of those who have attained proficiency in them, gradually calling upon him to venture out with a confidence in his own power. So then, when Nature gives her pupil progressive exercises in self-reliance, she instructs him to obey the copy first with a soldier's obedience, departing gradually therefrom, before he can handle his mental and moral faculties with any competency or pleasure. What, then, in view of these reflections, ought the teacher to be before his flock of imitators, in his life out of school and in school, in his habits both mental

and moral? From the general appearance of a school, you have date for a pretty close estimate of their instructor. His exhortations and example will be apparent in healthy moral sentiments in the taught. His principles of order, diligence, the amount of energy, application, and sincerity, in his own. constitution, will be reflected in a greater or less degree in his charge of imitators.

Nor is there any difference-more than one of degree-between the text-books and the oral instructor. The quality and wholesomeness of subjects in one class of books, the perspicuity and attractiveness in another, exercise a corresponding influence upon the scholar. So the neat dress of a school book as well as the tidy attire of the master, extend, in their influence, farther than any one but the close student of the school-room would be willing to suppose.

Through the influence of this school-room principle of imitation the character of a school is susceptible of no small modification in a short space of time; and does not this remind the instructor, who cherishes with so lively a zeal his own reputation, that out of school as well as in school his passive influence is stamping its impress on the minds of his charge?

NOT many years since one of my co-teachers came to me at the close of school for the day, saying, half discouraged, that Carrie, an impulsive, sympathetic child, was becoming sullen and untractable. "What shall I do?" was her troubled inquiry. "Possibly," said I, "the change is somewhat in your own feelings. Try. Pray for her this evening, and tomorrow come with the purpose to be her true, kind friend.” The next night Miss A. came. "How about Carrie?" I asked. "Have you been talking to her since last night, Mr. B.?" "Not a word. Why?" With emotion swelling to her eyes she replied, "Carrie came to me to-day after recitation, kissed me, and weeping asked forgiveness for having dis

pleased me." What, dear reader, think you, wrought that change? Was it not magic love? Ever after Carrie and Miss A. were on good terms. To-day that teacher sleeps in the valley of the Connecticut, but her works do follow her, and the seeds of a loving prayer upon that eventful evening are, I doubt not, bearing fruit in the hearts of more than one as I write this..

We do not know that our Saviour, the great Teacher, ever lost his long-forbearing patience-ever uttered an unkind word. And may we not reverently compare the true educator to that One who gathered around him his learners-his disciples-and who said "Suffer little children to come unto me?"

The teacher is constantly dealing with youthful faculties, and in his daily efforts he must not forget the laws of influence especially applicable to early periods of life. Love is a three-fold cord not quickly broken. Let the pupil feel that you really love him, and scarcely any thing will give you a greater hold upon him. Love begets love, and

"Love only is the loan for love."

The pupil, conscious of your affection, will dread more your grieved look or eye of kind reproof than any mere corporal punishment. Try it. I fear that as teachers and as a race we have not yet learned and appreciated the power of sincere good-will toward all. Love to the child is as sunbeams to the flower. Shall, then, your school-room be filled with the sunlight of gladness, and your pupils long for hours of school?

My dear brothers and sisters, as you toil in your sphere, it may be seemingly unnoticed, forget not that you are sowing for a sure harvest; and may it be an ingathering of good, and of blessing upon your memory, even when we may be pulseless and still.

B.