drifted into that semi-conscious condition between sleeping and waking, in which one's only sense of what a speaker is saying is a sense of relief when he finally sits down; but this man had a kind of fierce magnetism which compelled our unwilling attention. It was a melancholy fact, he said, that teachers, particularly primary teachers, were entering the profession with too scanty an equipment for their work. They didn't know enough and they permitted themselves to forget what they had once known. They were thus unfit for their duties, unfit to discipline the mind of youth. Then he became. concrete and, pointing out of the window to two large granite balls which capped the gate posts of the High school building, he said: "What is the cubic contents of these spheres? Can you find it without hesitation? If not, how dare you consider yourself qualified to teach a child that two and two make four?" I sat and trembled. Would he call for a rising vote of those who felt competent to do the hateful example on the spot? Was he about to send someone out to measure the horrible spheres? What if he should then call on someone at random-me perhaps !— to go to the board and work out the result. My terrified mind presented to me a decimal, 3.1416+; but what to do with it? Did one multiply or divide? Or was it not, perhaps, something to be used in cube root? Or in plastering a room?

The awful moment passed; the man sat down and we guilty ones were delivered from the more imminent peril, but we knew the day of reckoning was not over. We should still have to settle with our

consciences and to learn how to find the cubic contents of a sphere before our weary heads touched the pillow that night-no matter how late the evening session held.

Meanwhile the chairman of the meeting was saying: "The subject is now open for discussion, 'The Necessary Preparation of a Teacher.'" As he spoke the door. opened and a new figure entered. It was that of a tall, handsome man, a teacher of many years' standing, but with no signs of advancing years in appearance except the thick, snow-white hair which piled itself in loose curls above his forehead. His cheeks were pink with the glow of exercise and he brought into the close room a refreshing whiff of the keen October air. True to his principles, after the morning session he had first taken a brief nap and then a long walk in the glorious woods-and he looked it. An indescribable sense of freshness and

vigor came with him. He looked inquiringly around the room, and then, seeing all eyes turned toward himself, he rose to the occasion and, folding his arms on the top of the upright piano, said in a clear, cheerful voice, "In my opinion the best preparation a teacher can have is nine hours' sleep and a good breakfast."

The effect was electrical. Our burdened consciences consciences threw off their load, and mine for one refused ever to take it up again. But the new recommendation I gladly adopted; though I have taught many a year since then I have never gone to my work without a good breakfast and hardly twice in a year without the previous nine. hours' sleep. Who shall say that teachers' conventions do not do

much good when speeches of such astounding common sense may be heard? I have not yet found time to review the process of finding the cubic contents of a sphere, but I verily believe that if it became necessary for me to do the thing I could somehow manage to do it.

The next convention that rises in my mind was in session in early January during a "cold snap" in an old-fashioned Maine winter. A little town in the northern part of our state had invited us to meet there and hospitably offered to entertain. us all without expense. There was -on the ground probably about three feet of snow on a level, but as none of it was on a level that seemed a ridiculously conservative estimate. The paths were broken through drifts which were frequently as high as our heads, and skirted the boundaries of other drifts which rose to the height of fourteen, eighteen or even twenty feet. Following furious storms and winds a season of solid, quiet cold had come. The mercury started the week at zero and registered a few degrees lower each night, reaching eighteen degrees below zero the night before the convention opened and promising to drop to twenty that night-a promise which it generously fulfilled by falling to twenty-two below.

On leaving the train I, as one of the younger teachers, was assigned to a place about a mile from the station and directed to go straight along the main road until I reached it. The early dark was closing in. I stumbled along between the drifts, every now and then in danger of pitching headlong as my foot went into an unexpected hollow. The cold was bitter and the snow

squeaked under my feet viciously, as it does in the dead of our northern winters. Obeying an uncommonly strong instinct for getting into the wrong place, after I felt that I had walked about two miles I stopped at a house which partially corresponded to the description I had received. There was a stepladder at the front window and I was met at the door by a woman upon whose face consternation was written. She said she was papering her settin' room and she told the committee that she couldn't take no convention people unless they was jest to their limit. She cheered up when I informed her that I was accredited to Mrs. Ephraim Smith and told me that it wasn't much more'n a half a mile farther down the same road.

My spirits sunk very low. I was half-frozen but, nevertheless, not unwilling to try my fortune elsewhere. It was evident that this lady had chosen that unseasonable time to paper her sitting room in order to escape exercising her hospitality toward "convention people." My fancy pictured her setting before an unbidden guest a bowl of cold paste as an evening repast, and I was extremely hungry. Moreover, I did not believe that the committee "was jest to their limit"; on the contrary, those on duty at the railroad station had seemed to seemed to possess boundless resources in the way of free entertainment. At length the right house appeared, surrounded by its rampart of drifts. A cheerful light shone from the windows and, even at a considerable distance, I could see a group of people looking out. They, at least, were not "spring cleaning" in January. As I plodded

along, hungry and tired, and chilled to the bone, I said to myself, "I hope there'll be a feather bed!"

Gentle reader, did you ever sleep in an unheated spare bedroom in northern Maine, when the thermometer stood at twenty-two degrees below zero, upon a mattress apparently stuffed with clamshells? If so you will judge me leniently; if not your opinion has no value whatever.

The door opened cordially and my misgivings vanished. I was warmed up mentally and physically in less time than it takes to tell it. Such a cozy little house as it was! A hardwood fire roared in the parlor "airtight" and made the glowing coal fires in sitting room and kitchen seem almost chilly by contrast. Oh, what a good supper was waiting for me! It is one of my pleasantest memories of any teachers' convention. I call it supper because that was the name of it, but there was roast chicken and baked potatoes and many other good other good things, among which was an apple pie which has lingered long in my memory. It had been baked six hours in a slow oven and was red all through and of unimaginable deliciousness.

After supper the whole family, father, mother, daughter of nineteen and son of fifteen, "guessed they'd rig up and go with me" to the evening session, though if I had proved "stuck up" only the daughter was going. Afterward they all went with me to all of the sessions, except occasionally the whose shop we visited in an intermission. It was a carpenter's shop -with an addition. I visited the addition, too, somewhat to Mr. Smith's dismay, but evidently to

father,

his still greater pride. It consisted of a rather large assortment of coffins and caskets. We were seventy miles beyond Bangor and he kept a full line of goods on hand. in the winter time.

To return to the convention; a Boston teacher, during the evening session, told us just how to teach "language." He tried very hard not to be patronizing the effort at times was really painful to witness, but so evident was it that I have forgotten every other feature of his discourse. We ran home from the lecture, all five of us. The sky was magnificent, full of brilliant stars and clear beyond words. It was cold beyond words, too, but a run of nearly a mile in the heaviest garments you can bring yourself to wear is conducive to warmth, so we arrived in a glow with not even a frozen nose or ear amongst us. As for the spare bedroom I will merely say that there was a feather bed which was at the same time the slumpiest and the springiest I have ever tried. There were five blankets and two "comforters" on the bed, besides three more neatly folded over the footboard. A great fire of hardwood burned in the airtight stove and the temperature of the room must have been about eighty-five. Again I make a disgraceful confession. I slept with my window closed! I would gladly have left it open for my own comfort, but I had respect to my hostess's property. I knew very well that the pretty pitcher which was full of water would freeze and burst after the fire had died down, if only a crack should be left for the fierce cold to get in. Twenty-two degrees below zero is not to be trifled with! However, I needn't

have feared about the fire, for I became dimly conscious, just as the clock was striking two, of the figure of the daughter of the house lifting off the whole top of the airtight stove, which opened like a lid, and putting in a mammoth chunk of "old growth" maple, so that in the morning the room was still warm and comfortable. The blankets and "comforters" I discarded one at a time, but I hereby declare unblushingly that I slept my allotted nine hours on that luxurious feather bed in great comfort. Next morning, at the convention, a Bowdoin professor gave us a vigorous, wholesome talk on athletics, and afterward we all visited the town's half-completed new library, a little gem, given by a wealthy Westerner to the place of his birth. There was a mural tablet of brass inside the building, inscribed with the names of great literary men. It was set rather high and we made out the names with some difficulty. "Shakespeare, Milton, Go-eth," read my host. "Go-eth," I repeated valiantly, following him with nearsighted gaze. Just then I observed the Boston lecturer of the previous evening standing at my elbow and smiling with an indulgent, supercilious air. He had caught the Maine schoolma'am in her native haunts and would doubtless report her habits of speech among his colleagues! Oh, why couldn't it have been the Bowdoin professor! He would have understood.

As the years slip by individual conventions become blurred. Is the sense of duty less keen than in our youth? Certainly the conscience is less painfully tender. Last spring when I heard an instructor of youth whom dyspepsia had plainly marked

for her own, averring that he regularly corrected five hundred essays. a week besides teaching his classes, I did not grow hot and cold at the thought of my own incompetence; for, though in term time essays form the staple of my literary diet, I can correct only two in ten minutes when they are short and good, and one in fifteen minutes when they are reasonably long and bad. Thus, even if I should cut down for the purpose my nine hours of sleep,-which is not to be thought of my achievements in that line would be hardly worth mentioning in comparison with his. Instead of dwelling upon this discouraging aspect of the subject I wandered off into a train of mild philosophizing. I asked myself, What is an essay? Two extreme types occurred to me between which the essay as a norm must somewhere exist. When my mother first went to school, at the age of four, seventy-five years ago, she was told to write a composition. It was, perhaps, not an unreasonable requirement for one of her attainments-she had already finished the New England primer and read in the Testament; but she did not know how to write a composition. An older girl wrote it for her, and mother duly copied it, quite unaware of any wrongdoing involved in the act. She remembers that it read thus,

"THE HORSE"

"The horse is a very useful animal. Some people are very cruel to them which is wrong. I will never do so."

She handed it in and it was accepted; but soon afterward she discovered the same literary effort in

In the course of these rambling reflections upon the true nature and value of the essay the dyspeptic schoolmaster-he of five hundred a week-closed his discourse, and, to emphasize my emancipation from the shackles which once had bound me, I persuaded a colleague to go with me for dinner to a hotel, shunning the cheap boarding houses where teachers rightfully belong, though the price of our midday meal, according to the schedule of our early years, would have supplied us each with "two suits of summer underwear." After that we drifted away from the convention entirely and took a long trolley ride between orchards white with apple blossoms, secure in the knowledge that, now that conventions sit chiefly in departments, it makes no special difference which department you attend, and the department of "Nature-study from a trolley-car seat" is as likely to be "uplifting and inspiring" as any other.