columns to an extended and virile discussion of the growth of lawlessness in the country. The resolutions adopted by the Educational Association touching this subject were confined to general terms:

"We believe in the American public school. From kindergarten to university it stands for sound training, thorough discipline, and good citizenship. While incompetent teaching, inadequate supervision, insufficient material support, or sluggish public opinion may for a time limit its usefulness, they can not wholly destroy its beneficent and uplifting influence. "We would emphasize in particular at this time the duty of the school to the community that it represents. The work of the school is not ended when its responsibilities to the individual pupils who attend it are discharged. It must keep constantly before it the aim, in co-operation with the home and other social forces, of so enriching and directing the public sentiment of the society it serves as to increase respect for law and order and devotion to high ideals and sounds principles, as well as to promote efficiency in both public and private life.

"We demand that school administration in all departments, including the appointment, promotion, and removal of teachers, and the selection of text-books, shall be wholly free from political influence and dictation of every sort. We appeal to educated public opinion and to the press of the country to enforce this demand, both in general and in particular instances."

Commisioner Harris developed his conception of "the relation of school discipline to moral education" as follows:

"Moral education is a training in habits, and not an inculcation of mere theoretical views. Mechanical disciplines are indispensible as an elementary basis of moral character. The school holds the pupil to a constant sense of responsibility, and thereby develops in him a keen sense of his transcendental freedom; he comes to realize that he is not only the author of his deed, but also accountable for his neglect to do the reasonable act. Lax discipline in a school saps the moral character of the pupil. It allows him to work merely as he pleases, and he will not re-enforce his feeble will by regularity, punctuality, and systematic industry. He grows up in habits of whispering and other species of intermeddling with his fellow pupils, neither doing what is reasonable himself, nor allowing others to do it. Never having subdued himself he will never subdue the world of chaos or any part of it as his life-work, but will have to be subdued by external

constraint on the part of his fellow men. Too strict discipline on the other hand, undermines moral character by emphasizing too much the mechanical duties, and especially the phase of obedience to authority, and it leaves the pupil in a state of perennial minority. He does not assimilate the law of duty and make it his own."

A NEW VIEW OF THE BIRD QUESTION.

"The Bird on a Woman's Hat" is the subject of an editorial by Edward W. Bok, in the May Ladies' Home Journal, which presents the live, practical side of the movement against the slaughter of birds for their plumage. The crusade, Mr. Bok considers, has been carried on upon unwise lines, and overzealously. "There is a practical element in this desired reform," he writes, "and it is this: Anybody who has given even the most cursory attention or study to botany knows that all forms of life have their origin in plant life. Every animal which exists either lives directly on some plants, or on insects which destroy plants. The birds find their sustenance mainly in the insects that injure vegetation and ofttimes kill it entirely. A sufficiently large number of insects will kill a crop. If there are no birds, naturally the insects have everything their own way. I have recently gone to considerable pains to find out from farmers to what extent the decrease of birds is affecting their crops, and I find that the condition is more alarming than we, who live in the cities and large centers, have any idea of. All the farmers to whom I spoke or wrote agreed that last year the increase of insects was unusually great, while the decrease of birds was even greater. For every hundred birds killed, about sixty are born. Hence it is easy to see that the greater the number of birds killed the more exposed become the crops of the farmer to the insects. The same may be said of our trees, for the bird is really the balance of Nature. To what extent this balance is being upset by fashion is easy to realize from the statement that during 1896 the plumage of over three millions of birds was received in New York. * * * It is these things which I would like women to think about when they purchase birds for their hats. Naturally a supply depends upon a demand. If women would moderate their buying of hats adorned with birds or their plumage fewer birds would be slaughtered. Those who kill the bird cannot be rightly attacked. They simply supply a demand. The reform in this matter lies with the women who have adopted this fashion."

EDUCATION'S HIGHER SIDE.

Florence Hull Winterburn, writing on "The Higher Side of Education" in the March Woman's Home Companion, has this to say:

"There is much in our mode of living in America that tends to bring out the hard and harsh side of character. We have aimed to become a practical people, and we think a great deal about machinery, and the Treasury Department, and the natural resources of our country, and very little about poetry and music, and that fair region that is a part of every soul, where sentiments and emotions dwell. And yet it is emotion that supplies the vital force for all our enterprises. Though the head plans, the heart directs, and the world would cease to move along, even in a mechanical way, were it not for human feeling.

"Why, then, is our idea of education to develop only the intellectual side of our children's natures? Why do we discourage every glimmer of sentiment and fancy, and insist upon it that a young creature should be full of logic and reason, that he should care only for things and for facts, and learn before the halo of infantile innocence has faded from his brow to apply our worldly-wise standard of values, even in his miniature social world? The result of all the object-teaching, so eagerly pursued just now, is a harsh kind of common sense, but it leaves the heart arid. We are rearing a race of young critics, of young skeptics, who believe nothing until it is proved, and have shaken off the credulity and tenderness natural to childhood in their efforts to meet the demands of modern education for keen, quick perception.

The

"Our schools used to try to make pupil receive; now they make them perceive. new method is superior in many ways, but it brings out too much metallic luster, and sharpens, but does not refine.

"All the refining and softening influences of home life must be brought to bear upon the other side, if we would save our children from growing hard, mechanical and ultrarealistic. Let us keep from them what is worldly and what relates to business, and devote ourselves to cultivating in their young hearts the tender graces that add moral beauty to intellectual strength. Early in his career, if at all, the child must learn that knowledge, success and wealth are not the only tangible and valuable things in life, but that deep. down where the plummet of science never falls are springs of feeling and wells of truth, from which the soul that would grow wise and strong in its power to help others must continually hope to be refreshed."

THE SCHOOL ROOM.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

His Life-1809-1894.

He was born and grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and began writing verse while he was a student in Harvard college. He began to study law after graduation, but literature was more attractive, and he soon became known for comic pieces, such as "The Last Leaf," and stirring lyrics like "Old Ironsides." These at once caught the popular fancy, and Holmes became known as a poet. Two years after graduation Holmes turned to medicine, which he studied diligently first at home, and afterwards for two years in Paris. In 1839 he was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth, a position which he held only two years, but was appointed to a similar post in Harvard in 1847, and held it with great distinction for thirty-five years. When fortyeight years of age he contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, then a new publication, the series of brilliant and witty papers called "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." This was followed shortly after by the "Professor at the Breakfast Table," and the "Poet at the Breakfast Table." He has also written three novels, "Elsie Venner," "The Guardian Angel," and "A Mortal Antipathy." His medical books, of which he wrote several, are little known outside the profession, but his poems, mostly occasional, prepared for social gatherings and on current themes, his novels, his books of essays and travel, attained wide popularity.

Holmes' Place and Influence.

Few authors of Holmes' depth have covered so wide a field or done their work so uniformly well. He was not a great thinker; he brought no burning message; he seldom struck the deep strata of life: but he knew the world surprisingly well and he touched its life at a thousand different points. He skimmed with wonderful grace over a vast amount of surface, but he seldom dived deep below. Like Pope, he could recut a somewhat commonplace idea until it scintillated at every point. With both it mattered not so much what? as how?

Holmes' hearty laugh and his keen enjoyment of the sweets of life have played their part in moulding the spirit of the century. Whittier did more than Holmes," says J. W. Chadwick, "to soften the Puritan theology, but Holmes did vastly more than Whittier to soften the Puritan temper of the community.

His was 'an undisguised enjoyment of earthly comforts;' a happy confidence in the excellence and glory of our present life; a persuasion, as one has said, that if God made us then he also meant us,' and he held to these things so earnestly, so pleasantly, so cheerily, that he could not help communicating them to everything he wrote. They pervade his books and poems like a most subtle essence, and his readers took them in at every breath. Many entered into his labors, and some, no doubt, did more than he to save what was best in the Puritan conscience while softening what was worse in the Puritan temper and what was most terrible in the Puritan theology. It does not appear that any one else did so much as Dr. Holmes to change the social temper of New England, to make it less harsh and joyless, and to make easy for his fellow-countrymen the transition from the old things to the new."-Pattee's American Literature.

I always thought cold victual nice;-
My choice would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land;-
Give me a mortgage here and there,--

Some good bank-stock, some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share,—

I only ask that Fortune send
A little more than I shall spend.
Honors are silly toys, I know,

And titles are but empty names;
I would, perhaps, be Plenipo,—
But only near St. James;
I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.
Jewels are bawbles; 'tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things;-
One good-sized diamond in a pin,
Some, not so large, in rings,-

A ruby, and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me;-I laugh at show.
My dame should dress in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)—
I own perhaps I might desire

Some shawls of true Cashmere,Some marrowy crapes of China silk, Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

(A landscape, foreground golden dirt.-
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)
Of books but few,-some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor;-

Some little luxury there

Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems, such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,

I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls' deride;-

One Stradivarius, I confess,
Two Meerschaums, I would fain possess.
Wealth's wasteful tricks I win not learn

Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;-
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But all must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share,—
I ask but one recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch;
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them much,—
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!

She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,

In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,

Or carolling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.

So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,

Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.

Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim, As floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn." -Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red, (Wedded since, and a widow,-something like ten years dead,)

Hearing a gush of music such as none before,

Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.

Blithe looked the morning on cottage and spire;
Hushed was his parting sigh,

While from his noble eye

Flashed the last sparkle of liberty's fire.

On the smooth green where the fresh leaf is springing.
Calmly the first-born of glory have met;
Hark! the death-volley around them is ringing!
Look with their life-blood the young grass is wet!
Faint is the feeble breath,
Murmuring low in death,

Tell to our sons how their father's have died; "'
Nerveless the iron hand,

Raised for its native land,

Lies by the weapon that gleams at its side.

Over the hillsides the wild knell is tolling,

From their far hamlets the yeomanry come;

As through the storm-clouds the thunder-burst rolling,
Circles the beat of the mustering drum.

Fast on the soldier's path
Darken the waves of wrath,

Long have they gathered and loud shall they fall;
Red glares the musket's flash,
Sharp rings the rifle's crash,
Blazing and clanging from thicket and wall.
Gayly the plume of the horseman was dancing,
Never to shadow his cold brow again;
Proudly at morning the war-steed was prancing,
Reeking and panting he droops on the rein;
Pale is the lip of scorn,
Voiceless the trumpet horn,

Torn is the silken-fringed red cross on high;
Many a belted breast

Low on the turf shall rest,

Ere the dark hunters the herd have passed by,
Snow-girdled crags where the hoarse wind is raving
Rocks where the weary floods murmur and wail,
Wilds where the fern by the furrow is waving,
Reeled with the echoes that rode on the gale;
Far as the tempest thrills
Over the darkened hills,

Far as the sunshine streams over the plain,
Roused by the tyrant band,
Woke all the mighty land,

Girded for battle, from mountain to main.

Green be the graves where her martyrs are lying!
Shroudless and tombless they sunk to their rest,-
While o'er their ashes the starry fold flying
Wraps the proud eagle they roused from his nest.
Borne on her Northern pine,
Long o'er the foaming brine

Spread her broad banner to storm and to sun;
Heaven keep her ever free,

Wide as o'er land and sea

Floats the fair emblem her heroes have won!

My First Walk with the Schoolmistress. [From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.] This is the shortest way, she said, as we came to a corner. Then we won't take it,said I. The schoolmistress laughed a little,

and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms. 1 The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burialground. He was on a grave with a broad, blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more. -Oh, yes, died,-with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave, said I.-His bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they lie, which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. Many years ago, when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of it, and the hyenahorror was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight. I have never got over it. The bones of my own ancestor, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the day of judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame!-that is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. The red Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors. I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tomb

"Mr. Paddock's row of English elms" has gone, but "Poor Benjamin" lies quietly under the same stone the schoolmistress saw through the iron rails.

stones; epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of "here lies" never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie. above and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor Benjamin's dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out there fighting another young fellow on the common, in the cool of that old July evening; -yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her comment upon what I told her. How women love Love! said I;-but she did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the main street.— Look down there,-I said, my friend, the professor, lived in that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years. He died out of it, the other day. -Died?— said the schoolmistress.-Certainly,―said I. -We die out of houses just as we die out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been called "the house we live in;" the house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the professor said the other day?-Do!-said the schoolmistress.

A man's body, said the professor, -is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe, -the professor said,-for like Mr. John Hunter and other great men, he brings in that shall with great effect sometimes,

you shall observe that a man's cloth

ing or series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his individual nature. We know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head,-a little loosely,-shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with which they severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures. See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell what the occupant is. I had no idea, said the Professor, -until I pulled up my domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably, and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable aspect and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the past await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called out and fixed forever. We had a curious illustration of the great fact on a very humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the midst of this picture was another, -the precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall of infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.

The professor lived in that house a long time-not twenty years, but pretty near it. When he entered that door two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last