Let the lives of the great and the good, whose words and deeds are the world's most glorious heritage, inspire you to action; let them "shame your cowardice by the temerity of their daring; spur your sloth by the grandeur of their diligence; goad your weakness by the energy of their strength; fire your indifference by the glow of their zeal; sting your pride by the unconscious irony of their noble manhood; until, all aflame with the contemplation of the glory of their mighty achievements, you resolve, like them, to dare and to do, and gird yourselves with that quickening and heroic spirit which sweeps all impediments from its path, surmounts all obstacles, recognizes no impossibilities, which impassionates ideals into actualities, vitalizes soaring imagination into settled purpose, and clothes frail mortality with the omnipotence of indomitable will."-The Canadian Teacher.

SEEKING THE LIGHT.

T was not the cry of alarm or distress, but one of intense surprise. Mr. Darrell descended the steps which led into the cellar, and saw his son staring at a whitish-yellow vine that had clambered across the floor.

"What is it, papa?" asked Fred, "and where did it come from?”

"We'll soon see," replied his father. He lit a match and followed the vine to a dark corner; and Fred saw that it had grown out of a half-decayed potato. "Why, that's queer, isn't it!" he asked.

"It is not unusual," said his father; "the vine simply obeyed a law of its nature. In what direction does it creep?"

Toward the cellar window," said Fred, after a moment's hesitation.

"Attracted by what?" asked his father, and to find what?"

"Sunshine, I guess," was Fred's an

leaves are tinted with a delicate green, a tint and vigor which it gets from the sunlight, which will grow greener and stronger every day. If you turn the vine away from the window, and come back and look at it to-morrow, you will find that it has set out for the light again."

"Would it?" asked Fred, much surprised.

'Yes, my boy, I have tried the experiment. What does the plant seem to desire most?"

"Light," replied Fred.

"And what shall we learn from that?" Fred thought for a moment. "That the plant needs light in order to live," he said; "and that we need sunshine as well as the plants."

"But there is a spiritual significance," his father gravely remarked.

A thoughtful look came into Fred's face.

"I know what you mean, papa," he said, "our hearts and souls need light." "Or we will not grow," added his father.-Christian Observer.

EDUCATIONAL FORCES IN THE

COMMUNITY.

SUPT. SAMUEL T. DUTTON.

'CHOOL supervision has hitherto been directing itself to the organization of teaching and those things that pertain to the inner life of the school. The time has come when more attention should be given to the organization of the community, to the end that schools may hold a more commanding position, and that the various social and educational forces may be brought into unity. There is never strict neutrality in public sentiment. If a community is not thoroughly committed to a broad policy, it is likely to assume an unfriendly attitude at times. It is highly important that the people be instructed regarding the aims of educa tion. School supervisors are at fault if some effort is not made for such instruction.

Not only has there been lack of constructive work in the interest of a healthy public opinion, but there has been an indisposition on the part of men and women to recognize the unity of moral and social aims, and to justly value the work performed by other forces than the

The tendency on the part of some branches of the church to ignore the great function of public education as a Christianizing influence is to be deplored. The union of the home and the school is of vast importance. Teachers and parents are mutually concerned in the education of the child. Each needs information and support from the other.

The good opinions and good wishes of all the people should go out toward the public schools, because of what they are calculated to do in the community. Two principles are to be emphasized; first, the importance of uniting educational forces; and second, the school should become the centre for this unity. Co-operation is to be the watchword of the new century in all departments of human endeavor.

Educational workers need to become more conscious of the commanding importance of the school as a social factor, and use every endeavor in enlisting a sympathetic co-operation on the part of the people.

THE SUPERVISION OF RURAL SCHOOLS.

STATE SUPT. HENRY SABIN.

N the office of supervisor of rural schools

pedant. Supervision is a blessing or a curse in proportion to the intelligence and skill with which it is administered. The country schools need a supervision, which in its effects challenges the respect and support of all interested. In selecting a suitable person to oversee a system of rural schools, in addition to a reasonable education and a clean personal character, we should look for adaptability to circumstances, the ability to discern the fitness of things so that he may accomplish that which is possible without wasting time on the impossible. The person who is chosen as supervisor of rural schools should have in the highest degree the qualities of

and a student. I would rather have in a teacher one divine spark of originality, lightened up by enthusiasm and zeal in the work, than all the knowledge that is contained in a thousand pages of the dead lore of the past. The rural school needs a supervision which inspires energy, awakens a desire to know the best, and which says, "Come, let us study, let us think, let us reason, let us discuss."

The influence of a refined, cultured scholar in the person of the supervisor is not to be lost sight of. The true supervisor is much more than a teacher. Supervision is itself a higher work than teaching. There are many districts in which the fitness of the teacher is determined by the per cent. recorded against her name. This induces teachers to study questions, not subjects. As a consequence, the rural school teacher becomes exceedingly narrow. with little depth of knowledge upon which to build her work. The prevailing method of examining teachers as a test of fitness for their work in an exceedingly ingenious device for enabling them to conceal their ignorance. The duty of determining the fitness of persons to enter upon the work of teaching requires great wisdom and skill, great intelligence, and much common sense.

There is a new field for supervision open in the duty of awakening public concern, and of strengthening the tone and trend of public thought directed toward the promotion of educational interests. The supervisor of rural schools must be acquainted with the resources of his district. He should know what constitutes good farming, should be acquainted with the grazing interests, the dairy, and the rotation of crops. He should be able to convince the people that he knows something besides books. It is not so much to invite the farmer or the miner to the school, as to take the school to the farm or the mine, and to show the children the foundations upon which have been built the great natural sciences of our day. The teacher must be a lover of nature in its various forms, and be able to interpret the language of rocks, and trees, and flowers, the running brook, the snows of winter, and the fruits of autumn.

The supervision needed by the country school must concern itself also with school extension, lectures, and libraries. establishment and maintenance of good roads finds in the supervisor a ready and

popular advocate. The country schools do not need what we ordinarily call close supervision; they do need a supervision which is intelligent and rational, is strong, manly, and vigorous, so that the character of the supervision commends the wisdom of the supervisor. The supervisor should be kept in the field every day in the school year. His vacations should not be entirely free from field work, for then he should be with the people and school officers, looking after school grounds, advising with directors or trustees in regard to buildings, choice of teachers, textbooks, and the general educational interests of the district. The supervision which I have attempted to mark out is that of a live, enthusiastic man, in sympathy with educational progress, in touch with the common people, consecrated to his work, who thinks no sacrifice too great, no labor too severe, when made in the cause of the common district school. -N. Y. School Journal.

READING.

BY ELLA M. POWERS.

THE
HE average boy or girl of fifteen will

read a newspaper or a magazine article in a manner far from satisfactory. Why? Words, ideas, and the child's thoughts seem to be in a chaotic mass. With no thought, young people gather astonishing facts like these from reading:

The Crusades were millinery expeditions undertaken by Christians.

The Indians were of weak construction and morality was great among them.

The action of the larnyx is to deform the voice.

In this manner the careless child reads on. He has never been taught to think, to consider, to form a picture in his mind as he reads. Perhaps he has had excellent drills on inflection, vowels, consonants, diphthongs, emphasis, etc., yet he has never been taught that concentrated thought and attention should construct a background to the picture he is trying to sketch by his reading. "Reading is that study which strengthens, because it makes you stand up straight and take air in your lungs and makes the muscles strong," said a grammar school pupil.

Prof. Bell says: "It is the divinity, the intelligence in man, that reads." The early and persistent use of words without

ideas is at the root of incorrect reading. The pupil is in a bondage to words and words only. What is the remedy?

Often, too long reading lessons are assigned. Better that a pupil read one paragraph understandingly, analyze the thought, explain it, search for further information, rewrite it and know it, than to skip and hop along over three pages.

Nothing tends to discourage pupils more than a constant drill on the same lesson. Give them variety. The sight of the same book, day after day, becomes

monotonous.

The eye must anticipate the voice. The reader must be trained to look ahead, glancing at not only a few advance words but sometimes a whole sentence. A teacher got some bill-posters, large advertising placards, bills of auction sales, etc.

At first she cut them so that only one or two sentences could be seen. These were displayed before the reading class just long enough to see the sentence, then removing it from sight she asked them to read it. Then she let them see three or four sentences, and after they had read aloud the first sentence the paper would be put down and the child would read the rest from training his eye to glance ahead.

Concert reading brings out the timid voices and checks the speed of the rapid readers, yet it is likely to impair expression, and should be used cautiously.

Miss Lewis divides her class into two sections, reading alternately; and the pupils decide upon the merits of the respective sections. She collects a few business letters and has them read by the pupils. This trains them to read manuscript, and makes them familiar with the language of business correspondence.

Let the voice fall at every period," says the rule. So it should, usually; but should the children be taught that the proper pause and inflection depend upon a little dot? Let them see that it is the sense, not the point, that demands it.

A mistake is made by the teacher who transforms the pupils into hunters following on the heels of the breathless, halffrightened reader, ready to fall upon him with criticism as soon as a word is "put in," or "left out" or "miscalled."

In some schools the pupils give a cent apiece each week to be used for buying books, and the pupils grow to be very proud of their own school library. It is the books we read before middle life that

largely mould our characters and influence our lives. Hence the need of wise supervision of the child's reading.-The Western Teacher.

THE LAST OF "THE CLARKS."

WITH

WITH the death of Alvan G. Clark the last of the celebrated trio of telescope makers known as "The Clarks" has passed away from the scene of their splendid achievements in the realm of scientific investigation. Americans may justly be proud of the pre-eminent success attained by these greatest of opticians. The trifling incident of the breaking of a dinner bell at the Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1843, led to the founding of this renowned firm, for George B. Clark, then a student of the institution, conceived the project of melting the fragments to procure a disc to be ground into the speculum of a reflecting telescope. In the toilsome effort of figuring he was assisted by his father, Alvan, a portrait painter, and later his younger brother, Alvan G., became associated with them under the name, destined to become of

| panion to Sirius, whose existence was long felt by science, but which baffled all attempts to discover it. Because of this notable observation the French Academy bestowed upon him the Lalande medal. He also discovered a number of obscure double stars.

It is worthy of note that this genial and kindly man was broad of vision, and while engaged upon what proved the culmination of his life-work, freely hinted in an address delivered before the Congress of Astronomy and AstroPhysics that much greater things are possible in telescope construction. His closing words are quite significant of his cheerful spirit and ardent hope: "The horizon of science has been greatly broadened within the last few years, but out on the borderland I see the glimmer of new lights, which wait for their interpretation, and the great telescopes of the future must be their interpreters."

WESTERN PRAIRIE SCHOOL.

BY ADDA HAYMAN.

This class of work, however, was soon exchanged for one much more difficultthe construction of the object glasses of refracting telescopes. These obtained signal recognition in England, because of their superior excellence, and the tide of fortune, which had been discouragingly slow, now began to turn. The courage of the trio in attempting constantly increasing apertures was rewarded with high success, and it was given to the youngest and sole surviving member to witness the completion of the great Yerkes refractor, whose objective-forty inches in diameter-was his crowning accomplishment.

Never had men more impressive and multiple monuments. The great telescopes of Princeton, Washington, Charlottesville, Pulkova, Mt. Hamilton and Williams Bay, ranging in diameter from 23 to 40 inches, not to mention many other noble instruments of smaller capacity, will perpetuate the name of "The Clarks" in the world of science.

Doubtless the 18-inch telescope of the Dearborn Observatory was a lingering source of gratulation to Mr. Alvan G. Clark, for it was while testing this instrument that he discovered the com

tral town of the central county of Kansas, stands a little stone schoolhouse or, at least, it did stand there sixteen years ago. One was surprised to see so substantial and neat a school building out on the prairie so far from any town. The fine modern furnishings of the interior might also have been a surprise, were it not known that the

progressive people of the West have wisely started the development of their country by laying as a foundation a public school system superior to that in many of the older

states.

This school had an annual term of nine months, divided into fall, winter and spring ing the severe winter months, and a lady terms-a man being employed to teach durduring the fall and spring terms. Almost any one could have told a stranger where to find "Ash Creek school-house," as it was not only the educational centre for all who lived in that section, but the religious, and often the social centre for the people scattered over the prairie, sometimes miles apart from one another, in homes ranging from neat frame houses to one-roomed sod houses, and even one or two "dug-outs."

There stood the little school-house alone on the prairie, with not a sprig of green near it, except during a few weeks in the spring, when the prairie was brilliant almost beyond description with grass and flowers, and only the tops of the nearest trees visible along Ash Creek, a little stream which winds among the bluffs a mile away,

and farther down empties into Smoky Hill river. To the southeast, about three miles distant, could be seen Hay-stack Mound, a bluff, or what eastern people would call a high hill, named from its resemblance to a hay-stack; and curious, because it stands entirely alone on the level prairie, quite apart from the range of bluffs which crosses this part of Kansas. On the county road passing near the school-house, a family of emigrants was occasionally seen, coming perhaps from Missouri, in a long, covered

46

emigrant wagon," which held the family and all its possessions. On one occasion, hundreds of sheep were driven along this road to the ranch a few miles beyond.

Perhaps few other schools in the United States have had a more interesting class of pupils than came to this Ash Creek school. There were representatives from a large number of states, and as great a variety of personal characteristics as it would be possible to find in any one ungraded school. There was the little colored girl from Boston. The school possessed such a purely democratic spirit that no one thought of shunning her on account of her color; and when the death of her mother brought a great sorrow into her life, the most popular girl in the school would not have received more sympathy from her school mates than did this little child of a darker race. What a pitiful funeral that was, which came to the school-house on one of the hottest Sunday afternoons of a hot Kansas summer! The plain pine coffin, and the little weeping child beside her incapable father. She had indeed lost her best earthly friend, and her schoolmates realized it. When she came, on the following day, to say good-bye to them, she was kissed by all of the girls as affectionately as though she were one of their own color.

Then there were the twins, who drove to school every morning, with their elder sister, in a shaky old carriage drawn by a harmless old blind horse. Every one knew Quigley's "Blind Billy," and every one knew the Quigleys, for they had come from Ireland, and had an interesting family history. Blind Billy seemed almost a part of the school, and stood as meek as a lamb, at the end of the session, while all the little girls assisted in the exciting work of putting him into his harness.

The school, of course, had its "Tom-boy," Nancy Jones, from Missouri. She was dark as an Indian, and in fact it was rumored that there was Indian blood in the family line. There were few things that Nancy would not dare to do. When a herd of Texas cattle one day surrounded the school house to graze on the short, curly "buffalo grass,' the herder rode up on his pony, and Nancy begged him to let her ride. Although nearly all western girls are expert riders, not many of them would have attempted this, for the ponies which the Texan herders ride are chosen for their swiftness, and can

rarely be managed by any but the herders themselves. Nancy mounted this pony, and was scarcely in the saddle when she was thrown, but she tried it again, this time with success. And it is likely that she was the only girl who had ever ridden or ever would ride that pony. Among other good riders in the school was the girl from Pennsylvania, who could ride a bareback horse on her knees. This same girl is now leading a quiet domestic life in Pennsylvania with her three children.

Then there was Allie S-, from Ohio, who earned her spending money one summer vacation by herding her neighbor's cattle; and, in place of a herder's pony, she rode a mule. She and her brother had their own pretty little pony on which they rode to school every morning. Let the reader picture to himself a group of school children, standing on the prairie after school, watching these two start for home-brother and sister on the same pony at full gallop, Allie's sunbonnet on her shoulders, and her short light hair flying in the wind.

When the younger children in this family were old enough to go to school, they all came in a wagon drawn by two oxen named Brigham Young and Henry Ward Beecher. "Brig" and "Beech" and the wagon assisted very much in the popular amusements of the school, by giving the pupils, at intermissions, numerous pleasant and exciting rides over the prairie, the two oxen on a brisk run, bumping the wagon down and across one particularly steep ravine, amid the children's half-frightened screams and shouts of laughter.

During the winter months, the "big boys" who came added new interest to the school life. They were kindly, earnest young men, big and strong, but rarely rough or rude. Then there was the "baby" of the school-a little fair-faced boy, just from Pennsylvania, who felt quite like a man in his first suit of trousers. What a contrast he was to the big boys, who made a great pet of him, and carried him about on their shoulders. These big western fellows, with their odd western expressions, were a continual wonder to the delicatelyreared eastern child. When, on one occasion, he was asked by one of them, "How's your pa?" (pronounced "paw") he mildly corrected him by replying, "Our dog has a paw, but I have a papa.' This same baby, however, soon developed into a little frecklefaced school-boy.

According to the standard of our prosperous people in the eastern states, these western people were poor; yet in this school, as in every community, there were degrees of poverty and of riches. Can an eastern girl comprehend how one grown almost to womanhood, who had lived all her life on the prairie, could feel rich in the possession of her first pair of buttoned shoes? Yet one of these girls searched over the prairie for a lost shoe-button, and, when it was found,