: he will
distinguish with much facility the word in any common sentence which
expresses an action, and that which denotes the agent. Let the reader
try the experiment immediately upon any child of six or seven years
old who has _not_ learned grammar, and he may easily ascertain the
fact.

A few months ago, Mr. ---- gave his little daughter H----, a child of
five years old, her first lesson in English grammar; but no alarming
book of grammar was produced upon the occasion, nor did the father put
on an unpropitious gravity of countenance. He explained to the smiling
child the nature of a verb, a pronoun, and a substantive.

Then he spoke a short familiar sentence, and asked H----, to try if
she could find out which word in it was a verb, which a pronoun, and
which a substantive. The little girl found them all out most
successfully, and formed no painful associations with her first
grammatical lesson. But though our pupil may easily understand, he
will easily forget our first explanations; but provided he understands
them at the moment, we should pardon his forgetfulness, and we should
patiently repeat the same exercise several days successively; a few
minutes at each lesson will be sufficient, and the simplest sentences,
such as children speak themselves, will be the best examples. Mr.
----, after having talked four or five times, for a few minutes at a
time, with his son S----, when S---- was between five and six years
old, about grammar, asked him if he knew what a pronoun meant? The boy
answered, "A word that is said instead of a substantive." As these
words might have been merely remembered by rote, the father questioned
his pupil further, and asked him to name any pronoun that he
recollected. S----immediately said, "_I_ a pronoun." "Name another,"
said his father. The boy answered after some pause, as if he doubted
whether it was or was not a pronoun, _A_. Now it would have been very
imprudent to have made a sudden exclamation at the child's mistake.
The father, without showing any surprise, gently answered, "No, my
dear, _a_ does not stand in the place of any substantive. We say _a
man_, but the word _a_ does not mean a _man_, when it is said by
itself--Does it?"

_S----._ No.

_Father._ Then try if you can find out a word that does.

_S----._ He, and _Sir_.

_Sir_ does stand, in conversation, in the place of a man, or
gentleman; therefore the boy, even by this mistake, showed that he had
formed, from the