that is, he shared with R. H. Quick the care and the loss on that organ in its early struggling days, before another lamented friend, Francis Storr, nursed it into prosperous authority.

Such professional pundits could of course bring heavier artillery to bear, yet in this field an irregular sharpshooter also may do some execution. So serious a subject is apt to have a soporific effect on writers as well as readers; but the present writer, to invite young readers as well as older ones, has tried to leaven the utile with the dulce. And if a moral have slipped among his ingredients, it is that our youth may be thankful for a lot gentler than the hard lines of schooling in the past.

ANCIENT SCHOOLS

WHEN one comes to think of it, there must have been schools in this world of ours ever since man began to read the stars. The first clearly mentioned in anything like history seems to be that royal boarding-school at which Daniel and his comrades had less reason to complain of their fare than as to the severity of means of punishment, even for those scholars that had won the highest prizes, study of sorts being here a slippery path to promotion. Our Bible gives us also some vaguer hint of Moses as having been at school among the Egyptians; and we read how under David masters and scholars drew lots for their part in the services of the Tabernacle. The mere counting the years of the Patriarchs must have made stiff sums for their children; then how could Father Noah measure the timbers of his ark without some practice in arithmetic? But indeed, centuries before the date of most Biblical personages, letters stamped on stone or brick, in Babylonia and Assyria, show that man had begun to learn his alphabet. Tiles, taken to have been schoolboy exercise-books in the cuneiform script, turn up among the ruins of Nippur, a Mesopotamian city older than Babylon; and here and there in our world prehistoric cave-dens have preserved such rude scratches of animal forms as might develop into a.b.c.

The first teachers would be priests, the first endowed schools temples, and the first lessons of the world's childhood were taught by pictures. Those early schoolmasters appear to have been in the way of

making a sacred mystery of their lessons, as indeed their successors. in all ages have shown a disposition to magnify their office, too commonly belittled by the rest of mankind, when once their halo of sanctity faded off. Gradually one set of educational reformers after another improved symbolic hieroglyphics into phonetic lettering which any son of Adam could learn to read with more or less trouble; and some sort of paper and pens made easier work than graving and painting on stones or clay tablets. The Greeks have the name of first completing with vowels an alphabet that set copies for so many others. This must have been the flower of a long budding time, often nipped by unkindly frosts of failure or winds of violence. We come on Greek books in such an advanced form that we are apt to forget how many previous centuries had gone to infant humanity getting through its elementary classes of stammered syllables and scrawled pot-hooks.

Not the least glory of Greek literature was the dramatic art that raised its actors on high heels and hid their faces in masks fitted with a sort of megaphonic apparatus, so as to make them more visible and audible for huge audiences. This meant of course a loss in minute expression of individual characteristics. Likewise, indeed, all early authors are found apt to take the eye of the many by strongly drawing human nature's general outlines rather than by elaborating such personal traits of habit or feeling as figure much in our fiction and biography. Their pictures of life, looming vaguely through the mists of time, oftenest look like composite photographs that blend many typical faces, where only here and there can we distinguish the marked features of an Achilles or an Aeneas, a Socrates or an Alexander. And if for the most part grown men of old are shown us in masses or in shadow, still more is it so with youngsters," pretty buds unblown" of which it is