ediately 'through' the namby-pamby
attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make
them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of
the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite
to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the
only kind of things their minds can digest.

But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last
resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the
right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing
just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses. The words may
sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. So
varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And
a strange secret does it often prove. A relative of mine was trying to
explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose
that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I,
who am killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if
you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, you may suppose that I am
not yet quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to
explain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you speak
with when you ain't quite dead."

In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied.
Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic
meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in
poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect,
never corrected. I remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age
of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the
staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and
that, when the boatman said,

"I'll row you o'er the ferry.
It is not for your silver bright,
But for your winsome lady,"

he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently found that
one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's
In Memoriam as

"Ring out the _food_ of rich and poor,
Ring in _redness_ to all mankind,"

and finding no inward difficulty.

The only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to insist on
varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be
possible, to some sort of practical test.

Let us next pass to the subject of App