ing it after it has been "pawed about by declamatory boys and men." But surely there is a reasonable habit of recitation as well as an unreasonable one; there is no need of declamatory pawing. To abandon all recitation, is to give up a custom which has unquestionably given delight and instruction to all the races of mankind. If our faces are set against vain display, and set towards rational enjoyment of one another, we need not fear that our social evenings will be marred by an occasional recitation. And, moreover, it is not for reciting's sake that I chiefly recommend this most faithful form of reading-learning by heart.

8. I come back, therefore, to this, that learning by heart is a good thing, and that it is neglected among us. Why is it neglected? Partly because of our indolence; but partly, I believe, because we do not sufficiently consider that it is a good thing, and needs to be taken in hand. We need to be reminded of it. I here remind you. Like a town-crier, ringing my bell, I would say to you, "Oyez, oyez ! Lost, stolen, or strayed, a good ancient practice-the good ancient practice of learning by heart. Every finder shall be handsomely rewarded."

9. If you ask, "What shall I learn?" the answer is, do as you do with tunes-begin with what you sincerely like best, what you would most wish to remember, what you would most enjoy saying to yourself or repeating to another. You will soon find the list inexhaustible. Then "keeping up" is easy. Every one has spare ten minutes: one of the problems of life is how to employ them usefully. You may well spend some in looking after and securing this good property you have won.

LUSHINGTON.

6. SCHOOL LIBRARIES.

1. The influence of well-selected books in a school is second only to that of the teacher; and in many instances the information, self-gleaned by the pupils, is the most valuable part of a common-school education.

2. A teacher may fail in the discharge of duty; but the golden grains of thought gleaned from good books will spring up in the youthful minds and yield their fruit, just as certainly as the fertile soil of our beautiful valleys rewards the toil of the husbandman with a bountiful harvest.

3. The object and aim of the public school should be to give children a thirst for information, a taste for reading; to make them alive to knowledge; to set them out on the path of self-education through life. Why teach them to read at all, if books be not afterwards furnished for them to read?

4. Not many years ago, in one of the obscure towns of Massachusetts, there lived a farmer's boy who "went to a common school" in the winter, and worked on the farm in summer. The books of a little town library fell into his hands; he devoured them, and hungered for more. He grew to be a man, and was acknowledged by all to be the most distinguished American educator of his time.

5. Every public school in our country is a debtor to Horace Mann. He thus graphically sums up the advantage of a school library: "Now no one thing will contribute more to intelligent reading in our schools than a well-selected library; and, through intelligence, the library will also contribute to rhetorical ease, grace, and expressiveness. Wake up a child to a consciousness of power and beauty, and you might as easily confine Hercules to a distaff, or bind Apollo to a tread-mill, as to confine his spirit within the mechanical round of a

school-room where such mechanism still exists. Let a child read and understand such stories as the friendship of Damon and Pythias, the integrity of Aristides, the fidelity of Regulus, the purity of Washington, the invincible perseverance of Franklin, and he will think differently and act differently all the days of his remaining life.

6. "Let boys or girls of sixteen years of age read an intelligible and popular treatise on astronomy and geology, and from that day few heavens will bend over their heads, and a new earth will spread out beneath their feet. A mind accustomed to go rejoicing over the splendid regions of the material universe, or to luxuriate in the richer worlds of thought, can never afterwards read like a wooden machine-a thing of cranks and pipes-to say nothing of the pleasures and the utility it will realize."

7. POEMS.

1. Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, like a meerschaum or a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum-the more porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity—its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations-so as to be gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves. So, you see, it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can penetrate.

2. Then, again, as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the maker's hands? Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These

pieces are strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as it were a great seed capsule, which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.

3. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud, and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric.

HOLMES.

8. SCROOGE AND MARLEY.

1. Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

2. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in

the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

3. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain.

4. Scrooge never painted out old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge, Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

5. Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and did n't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

6. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no