al enjoyment to the fresh young voices
raised again and again in song. There was, however, something so
curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The
Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds
of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see
one;--and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I
love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song
which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe
not without justice, it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee."
One wonders if they sing it in the Philippine schools; and, so far as
these regions are concerned, one wishes that some teacher with a spark
of genius would take Goldsmith's hint and write a simple song for
Esquimau children that should

"Extol the treasures of their finny seas
And their long nights of revelry and ease";

the splendour of summer's perpetual sunshine and the weird radiance of
the Northern Lights; but prosody is not taught in your "Normal" school.
The thing is a vain, artificial attempt to impose a whole body of ideas,
notions, standards of comparison, metaphors, similes, and sentiments
upon a race to which, in great measure, they must ever be foreign and
unintelligible. Here were girls reading in a text-book of so-called
physiology, and, as it happened, the lesson that day was on the evils of
tight lacing! The reading of that book, I was informed, is imposed by
special United States statute, and the teacher must make a separate
report that so much of it has been duly gone through each month before
the salary can be drawn. Yet none of those girls ever saw a corset or
ever will. One is reminded of the dear old lady who used to visit the
jails and distribute tracts on _The Evils of Keeping Bad Company_.

But these incongruities aside, the school was a good school and well
taught, the government appointing the teachers, as I learned, upon the
nomination of the mission authorities; the only way that a government
school can be successful at any mission station, for the two agencies
must work together, as one's right hand works with one's left, to effect
any satisfactory result. The hours spent in it were very enjoyable, and
one wished one might have had opportunity for further acquaintance with
some of the bright-faced, interesting children, both full-bloods and
half-breeds.

Unalaklik is a thriving E