oes it all sound very queer?" I asked.

"The going to bed does," she made reply; "and the milk toast and the egg
for dinner, and the working hard. The examinations sound something like
the tests we have, _They_ are questions to write answers to, but we
don't think much about them. I don't believe any of the girls or boys go
to bed afterwards, or have milk toast and eggs for dinner--on purpose
because they have had a test!"

She was manifestly puzzled. "Perhaps it is because we have tests about
every two weeks, and not just in January and June," she suggested.

She did not seem disposed to investigate further the subject of her
mother's and my school-days. In a few moments she ran off to her play.

When she was quite out of hearing her mother burst into a hearty laugh.
"Poor child!" she exclaimed. "She thinks we and our school were very
curious. I wonder why," she continued more seriously, "we did take
examinations, and lessons, too, so weightily. Children don't in these
days. The school-days of the week are so full of holiday spirit for them
that, actually, Saturday is not much of gala day. Think of what Saturday
was to _us_! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday was _Saturday_,
to us! Do you remember the things we did? You wrote poems and I painted
pictures, and we read stories, and 'acted' them. Then, we had our
gardens in the spring, and our experiments in cake-baking in the winter.
My girls do none of these things on Saturday. The day is not to them
what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."

[Illustration: THEY PAINT PICTURES AS A REGULAR PART OF THEIR SCHOOL
ROUTINE]

I had often wondered; but these reflections of my old schoolmate gave me
an inkling of what the main difference is. To us, school had been a
place in which we learned lessons from books--books of arithmetic, books
of grammar, or other purely academic books. For five days of the week
our childish minds were held to our lessons; and our lessons, without
exception, dealt with technicalities--parts of speech, laws of
mathematics, facts of history, definitions of the terms of geography.
Small marvel that Saturday was a gala day to us. It was the one "week
day" when we might be unacademic!

But children of the present time have no such need of Saturday. They
write poems, and paint pictures, and read stories, and "act" them, and
plant gardens, and even bake cake, as regular parts of their school
routine. The schools are no longer sol