Rothchild's Maxims.

It is reported that Baron Rothchild used to recommend the following rules to young men who wished to achieve business success:

Attend strictly to the details of busi

ness.

Be prompt in all things.

Consider well, then decide positively. Dare to do right, fear to do wrong. Endure trials patiently.

Fight life's battle bravely, manfully. Go not into the society of the vicious. Hold integrity sacred.

Injure not another's reputation or busi

ness.

Join hands only with the virtuous.
Keep your mind from evil thoughts.
Lie not for any consideration.
Make few acquaintances.

Never try to appear what you are not.
Observe good manners.
Pay your debts promptly.

Question not the veracity of a friend. Respect the counsel of your parents. Sacrifice money rather than principle. Touch not, taste not intoxicating liquors.

Use your leisure hours for improvement.

Venture not upon the threshold of wrong.

Watch carefully over your passions. Xtend to everyone a kindly salutation. Yield not to discouragement. Zealously labor for the right.

The Note-Book.

Normal schools are sometimes very great sinners in the over use of the notebook as a teaching device. It is encouraging to know that they are beginning to discard this fetich. Professor Brier, a normal school teacher of considerable experience, has this to say in the Normal Badger on the subject of note-books:

"One of the most dreary school deserts over which the hobby rider loves to amble on his little wooden horse, Form, is the the desert known as the school notebook.

"That there are subjects in which the note-book is permissible, even advisable, if taken like other opiates in small quan

tities, is not likely to be denied. That there is any very great benefit to come from making note-books by common school pupils on common school subjects, is questionable. The note-book, by making emphatic a formal way of recording definitions and tabulations, copied verbatim from some text-book or from the blackboard, tends to lead the child away from essential processes of thought, and, instead of the bread-a well-stored memory-gives him a stone-a a well written note-book. He may take some pride in showing his note-book, but his friends. realize, though he may not, that he has sacrificed his wit to what he has writ.

"The specific directions sometimes given for the compilation of these specious substitutes for thought would be amusing were they not distressing. They enter into details warrantable in but one school in the country, that at West Point, where the effort is made to organize a a body of men into the form of the most damaging projectile to an enemy, and the less thought, except the one thought of obedience to authority, the better is the projectile.-Western Teacher.

The Queen of Clubs.

Clubs of three and clubs of a score,
Isms and ologies more and more,
Sappho and Psyche clubs galore,
Clubs of archæologic research,

Clubs to consider the school and church,
To cleanse from society every smirch;
Clubs of science and clubs of song,

For the righting and curing of every wrong
That to mankind can ever belong;

Sanitation is their despair,
Microbes, too, come in for a share;
Tenement crowds and pure, fresh air;
Literature in every part,

Sculpture, history, knowledge, art,
Analysis of the home and heart,
Social and economic laws,
Crime and poverty, clause on clause,
Man's degeneracy the cause—

I sit alone by my glowing grate,
I feel that the century waxeth late.
My wife is studying church and state.
Cyclopedias piled up still;

Of dictionaries I've had my fill,
Huxley and Darwin, Spencer and Mill.

I think of my grandmother's easy chair,
Her knitting in peace by the chimney there,
Her stories, and then of her tranquil air,
And I wonder sometimes, though I never say,
If all this worry and fuss can pay
That steals the calm of our lives away.
And I long sometimes with a pain that smarts
For some of my darling's forgotten arts,
For the joy and peace of my queen of hearts.
Of course I'm a century late, and then
They say we are jealous over again.
We're out of fashion, we stupid men.

I think-but I say it under my breath-
That I fear my wife will be clubbed to death.
-E. P. Seabury in New York Sun.

Reading in the Old Schools. As the ability to read is a pre-requisite to any use of books, of course, the teaching of reading must take a prominent place in any system of schools, at any time and in any place. Sixty or seventy years ago, the universal method of teaching a child to read was to begin with the alphabet, and require him first of all, "to learn his letters." To learn to recognize these twenty-six forms and to call each by its proper name was an enormous task, frequently requiring many months. In fact, fifty-two forms had to be learned for the capitals and small letters.

When this gigantic work was accomplished, then weeks and months were spent on the a b abs. That is, the child was required to learn the senseless combination of each vowel with each consonant, as a b, ab; e b, eb; i b, ib; o b, ob; u b, ub; a c, ac, etc. The combinations, also, must be learned in the opposite order, as ba, ba; be, be, etc. It was only after this immense work was done by the little student, -work wholly mechanical and utterly without meaning,that he began to read at all. And his first lessons in reading were almost as senseless as the preceding work. It seemed to be assumed that the difficulty which a word would present to a child was to be measured simply by the number of letters required to spell it. Hence, the first reading lessons must consist of words of two letters cnly. The result was such juicy lessons as the following, actually copied from an old book: "Is he in? He is in. Is it by us? It is by us. Is it on? It is on. So I am up,

etc." It never seemed to dawn on our fathers that a word in which the child had an interest, like horse or garden, was a much easier word for him to master than a meaningless word of two letters. Child-study had not yet taught them all its lessons.

When, through much tribulation, the child had acquired the power to read simple lessons, then two or four times a day, he read from his reader in the class. The burden of the teacher's instruction to him was, "Speak up, loud," "Mind your stops," "Keep up your voice at a comma," "Stop at a comma long enough to count one; at a semi-colon long enough to count two; at a colon, three; at a pe

riod, four. Let your voice fall at a period." It will be instructive for any one to take up a piece and read it according to these directions, and compare the result with any tolerably natural rendering of the piece. The truth is that in reading, as in arithmetic, the attempt was to work wholly from the outside; there was no appeal to the child's consciousness.

Naturally, the result was that many grew up to manhood with no power at all to read; at best, they could only call words imperfectly. It was no uncommon thing in the old country school, when such a grown blunderer rose in the back seat to take his "turn" in reading, for some bright little fellow to stand by his side and whisper to him sentence after sentence which he then pronounced aloud. I did not hear it, but I have little doubt it is true that when one day such a reader had covered the text with his thumb, and his little prompter whispered, "Darn you, take your thumb off," he read out the request as a part of the lesson, utterly unconscious of any incongruity.

The reading books for older and younger pupils were dreary affairs in those days. Little was attempted in the way of pictorial illustration; and such pictures as were given were simply hideous. A book lies before me prepared for the older classes. It is about seventyfive years old. The selections are all from British authors, largely from The Spectator, Milton, Pope, Blair, and Shakespeare. The selections are good literature, almost without exception. But think of a country boy, among the hills of New England with a teacher probably nearly or quite as ignorant as himself, attempting to "put meaning" into these fragments! The directions for declamation, or recitation, are more copious than those for reading, for "speaking pieces" was popular in those days; very commonly the winter term of country school closed with a grand "exhibition," whereby the elocutionary and histrionic ability of the older pupils was exhibited to the great delight of the whole countryside.

About fifty years ago, the readers contained extensive directions for expression. Many of them had an elaborate system of marking the selections, to indicate

quality and pitch of voice, rate of utterance, emphasis, pause, and inflection. About half the book usually was taken up by these systems of marking, with illustrative extracts to which they were to be applied. Some of these extracts were marked by the author, others it was expected would be appropriately marked by the student. Fancy any tolerably good reader trying to read one of these marked extracts in accordance with the markings! Running a race with arms and legs both pinioned would be easy in comparison. The whole scheme was only another attempt to do from the outside what can be done from within only.

It is said that a young theologue once went to the elder Beecher to ask advice about preparing and delivering sermons. Said Beecher: "Choose your text, meditate upon it long and carefully, pray over it, get filled with your subject, then go into the pulpit and let natur' caper.' I think instruction as to how we must read in order to read well necessarily reduces to about the same formula: Get filled with the thought and emotion of your author; then give it forth as from yourself, with no thought or care about anything aside from what you are trying to express. To be sure, certain studies and drills apart from the reading lesson may enable "natur' to caper" more appropriately and gracefully than she would otherwise. E. C. H.

Problems.

A triangle having equal sides contains 4,287.085824 square feet. What is the A. L. RAVELY, length of one side? Edgeley, N.D.

There is a board 12 feet long, 10 inches at one end and 12 inches at the other, ends parallel, and angles at either end equal. Locate a line parallel to the ends. which will divide the board equally.

Can some of your readers give a clear solution? WM. R. FRANK.

A Solution.

Two cisterns of equal dimensions are filled with water, and the taps for both are opened at the same time. If the

water in one will run out in five hours and that in the other in four hours, find when one cistern will have twice as much water in it as the other.

ARITHMETICAL SOLUTION.

I. For convenience, we will designate the fast-flowing cistern as A, the other B. Since A discharges in 4 hours and B in 5, B discharges in of the time it takes A to discharge; or, to discharge a given amount of water, it takes B of the time it takes A.

II. Now, from the time at which B contains twice as much water as A, it takes A of the time it takes itself to finish discharging.

But if B had the same amount of water at this time it would take it by (I) of the time it takes A to finish discharging. Now, as it contains twice as much water as A at this time, it will take it 2X, the time it takes A to finish discharging.

III. It takes B 1 hour longer to finish discharging than A (5 hours-4 hours 1 hour). Hence, the time it takes A to finish discharging- the time it takes A to finish discharging=1 hour, or the time it takes A to finish discharging=1 hour. ... The time it takes A to finish discharging== hour.

IV. Now, as it takes A of an hour to finish discharging after the time at which B contains twice as much water as it, it has been running 4 hours-hour 3 hours.-Ans.

I. T. VALENTINE, Proctor, Tex.

The Return of the Birds. Observed by children of South Side School, Centralia, Ill.

Editor of Journal:

During the past year the children of my primary grades, in connection with their nature work, have been greatly interested in the study of birds. Their nests, eggs, habits, etc., have been carefully watched and examined by the little people.

When the migratory birds began to gather in flocks, last fall, preparatory to taking their departure, the children made daily reports concerning them. With the beginning of spring, watched eagerly for their return. A careful record has been kept of the day when representatives of the various varieties were first seen. Thinking it may be of interest I enclose it with this letter:

The Mechanics of Reading. "Oral reading is talking from a written or printed page." We think this is the best definition for oral reading that we have ever heard. It is supposed that when one talks, he naturally and freely expresses his own thought and feeling. So, when he reads correctly, he expresses in the same way the thought and feeling of another, which for the time being he adopts as his own.

But there are a great many elements that go to make up good talking; and, of course if our definition is correct, the same elements will enter into good reading. Among these, we may specify quality of voice, enunciation, pitch, rate of speech, inflection, emphasis, and pause. Now, a good talker is able to use his voice at will in all these particulars, a power which comes only with much training. Therefore, in order to make good readers, training in all these particulars is necessary in the schoolroom. But such training is not training in reading; it is training in the mechanics of reading, and should be had apart from drill in reading itself. It may take a part of the period assigned to reading, or it may have a time especially devoted to it; but in any case it should not interfere with the exercise in reading. It is

a great mistake when the lesson in reading is interrupted for correction or drill in any of these particulars. At the time of the reading lesson, read and do nothing else.

Few children have voices of the best quality, their tones are not generally as round and full and sweet as they might be. But, it is peculiarly unfortunate that, as the years go on, these tones instead of improving sadly deteriorate, so that a majority of people speak in thin, harsh, wiry tones. Very few public speakers can use clear, round, resonant, chest tones, especially when they become warmed up with a subject. Such tones one ought to have the power to use at will; and they should be habitual unless there is some call to use some other. But the good reader must be able to use at will any quality which is appropriate to the words he is speaking; the quality when Shylock says "I will have my bond," differs greatly from that when the Psalmist says, "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations," or Marmion shouts "Charge, Chester, charge; On, Stanley, on. Now the power to produce any quality at will can come only by much careful drill and practice; this drill and practice should not be neglected in school; but should be had apart from the exercise in reading.

Much the same may be said of enunciation. We admire the speaker whose words drop from his lips like bright, new coins from the mint, while the effort required to produce such a result is wholly concealed. Nothing but careful and wellordered drill can give such power; but it should not be drill in the reading exercise.

It will be noticed that most ordinary readers read everything in the same pitch of voice; in fact, we have met not a few who seemed almost powerless to take any pitch at will; while to change pitch suddenly during the reading of a passage was utterly impossible. Now it needs no argument to show how absolutely essential to correct expression proper pitch is; but the power to take any pitch at pleasure, or to change the pitch instantly, is acquired only by much careful practice. What is said about pitch may be said equally well about rate of utterance; and the power to move at any rate one

chooses is acquired by much practice only. It should be said that a very slow rate should be achieved by a proper distribution of pauses, and never by drawling.

The tendency of most people in speaking, and of nearly all readers, is to use the rising inflection too much. The general meaning of that inflection is to express doubt, inquiry, or indecision. Whenever the state of mind is positive or determined, the falling inflection prevails; while fun, sarcasm, punning, and double meaning generally call for the circumflex. Again, it should be noticed that we may have several rising or falling inflections according to the length or intensity of the slide. A slight rise in inflection may express a slight degree of surprise, while intense astonishment will send the voice up a whole octave. falling inflection may express a positive statement, while a deeper falling inflection following may express more positively a contrasted statement. "It is sown in weakness'; it is raised in power". " Now, a pupil should be able to give any kind of inflection he may choose, and with any degree of intensity.

A

Often pupils find it almost impossible to emphasize a word except by giving it a sort of sledge-hammer stress, such as is rarely or never appropriate. Without much drill, they can not give that subtler and more effective emphasis that comes from a well modulated turn of the voice, or from a change of pitch, or from a

mere pause. Often a badly-trained

reader having once started his voice finds it nearly or quite impossible to make any pause, except as he holds himself at a punctuation mark in obedience to the training of childhood. The truth is that effective speech requires many a pause where there is no punctuation mark, while it properly passes over many punctuation marks without pause. Among the precious bits that we put into our memory in childhood so firmly that it stays there yet, is the following: "Punctuation is the division of a composition into sentences or parts of sentences, by points or stops, to mark the pauses to be observed in reading and show the connection of the several parts or clauses." These marks are not "to mark the pauses to be observed in reading" except as the "connection of the