harges for blasting the rock, and accidentally laid the wires connected
with the powder in too close proximity to the temporary railway-track
already laid in the tunnel. The charges were intended to be fired from an
electric battery provided for the purpose; but a thunder-cloud came up, and
the electric force from it was conveyed by the rails into the tunnel and
exploded the charges, and several men were killed. No one was inclined to
censure the unfortunate men for carelessness in not guarding against a
contingency so utterly unforeseen by them, though it is plain that, as
is often said to children in precisely analogous cases, they _might have
known_.

_Children's Studies_.--_Spelling_.

There is, perhaps, no department of the management of children in which
they incur more undeserved censure, and even punishment, and are treated
with so little consideration for faults arising solely from the immaturity
of their minds, than in the direction of what may be called school studies.
Few people have any proper appreciation of the enormous difficulties which
a child has to encounter in learning to read and spell. How many parents
become discouraged, and manifest their discouragement and dissatisfaction
to the child in reproving and complaints, at what they consider his slow
progress in learning to spell--forgetting that in the English language
there are in common, every-day use eight or ten thousand words, almost all
of which are to be learned separately, by a bare and cheerless toil of
committing to memory, with comparatively little definite help from the
sound. We have ourselves become so accustomed to seeing the word _bear_,
for example, when denoting the animal, spelt _b e a r_, that we are very
prone to imagine that there is something naturally appropriate in those
letters and in that collocation of them, to represent that sound when used
to denote that idea. But what is there in the nature and power of
the letters to aid the child in perceiving--or, when told, in
remembering--whether, when referring to the animal, he is to write _bear_,
or _bare_, or _bair_, or _bayr_, or _bere_, as in _where_. So with the word
_you._ It seems to us the most natural thing in the world to spell it _y
o u_. And when the little pupil, judging by the sound, writes it _y u_, we
mortify him by our ridicule, as if he had done something in itself absurd.
But how is he to know, except by the hardest, most meaningless, and
distasteful toil of th