onscious mind. When you
force a child to attend to a lesson for fear of the tawse, you merely
engage the least important part of his mind--the conscious. While he
stares at the blackboard his unconscious is concerned with other
things."

"What sort of things?" asked Macdonald.

"Very probably his unconscious is working out an elaborate plan to
murder you," I said, "and I don't blame it either," I added.

"And the snowballs?" queried Mrs. Macdonald.

"When a boy makes a snowball, he is interested; his whole soul is in
the job, that is, his unconscious and his conscious are working
together. For the moment he is an artist, a creator."

"So that's the new education . . . making snowballs?" said Macdonald.

"It isn't really," I said; "but what I want to do is to point out that
making snowballs is nearer to true education than the spoon-feeding we
call education to-day."

* * * * *

Duncan does not like me. He is a young dominie of twenty-three or
thereabouts, a friend of Macdonald, and he has just been demobilised.
He was a major, and he does not seem to have recovered from the
experience. He has got what the vulgar call swelled head. Last night
he was dilating upon the delinquencies of the old retired teacher who
ran the school while Duncan was on active service. It seems that the
old man had allowed the school to run to seed.

"Would you believe it," I overheard Duncan say to Macdonald, "when I
came back I found that the boys and girls were playing in the same
playground. Why, man, some of them were playing on the road! And the
discipline! Awful!"

Poor children! I see it all; I see Duncan line them up like a squad of
recruits, and march them into school with never a smile on their faces
or a word on their lips. Macdonald tells me that he makes them lift
their slates by numbers.

And the amusing thing is that Duncan thinks himself one of the more
advanced teachers. He reads the educational journals, and eagerly
devours the articles about new methods in teaching arithmetic and
geography. His school is only a mile and a half away, and I hope that
he will come over to see Mac a few times while I am here.

I have seen the old type of dominie, and I have seen the new type. I
prefer the former. He had many faults, but he usually managed to do
something for the human side of the children. The new type is a danger
to children. The old dominie leathered the children so tha