th a view
not only to the future profit, but also to the future pleasure and
instruction of the children. When you think that many of them will be
artisans, whose only occupation, perhaps, will be to perform some one
process of manufactures, requiring next to no thought or skill, it
becomes the more necessary to educate their hands as well as their heads.
Man is an animal very fond of construction of any sort; and a wise
teacher, knowing the happiness that flows from handiwork, will seize upon
opportunities for teaching even the most trivial accomplishments of a
manual kind. They will come in, hereafter, to embellish a man's home,
and to endear it to him. They will occupy time that would, otherwise, be
ill spent. And, besides, there are many persons whose cleverness lies
only in this way; and you have to teach them this or nothing.

3. THE PLAYGROUND.

This is a place quite as important as the school-room. Here it is, that
a large part of the moral cultivation may be carried on. It is a great
object to humanize the conduct of children to each other at play times
without interfering with them, or controlling them, too much. But we
have, before, gone over the motives which should actuate a teacher in his
moral guidance; and it needs only to remark, that the playground is a
place where that guidance is eminently required; and where the exigencies
for it are most easily discerned.

Those games should not be overlooked which are of a manly kind, and
likely to be continued in after life. This brings us naturally to think
of the playgrounds for children of a larger growth. Hitherto there has
been a sad deficiency in this matter in our manufacturing towns, and
almost everywhere else. Can any thing be more lamentable to contemplate
than a dull, grim, and vicious population, whose only amusement is
sensuality? Yet, what can we expect, if we provide no means whatever of
recreation; if we never share our own pleasures with our poorer brethren;
and if the public buildings which invite them in their brief hours of
leisure are chiefly gin palaces? As for our cathedrals and great
churches, we mostly have them well locked up, for fear any one should
steal in and say a prayer, or contemplate a noble work of art, without
paying for it: and we shut people up by thousands in dense towns with no
outlets to the country, but those which are guarded on each side by dusty
hedges. Now an open space near a town is one of nature