People do not realize that, with a very little trouble, they might have a hundred bird neighbors in summer, where now there are none, or only a pair or two, who have come uninvited and unprovided for. Every home in the country or near our cities, and very many in the towns, and even in the cities themselves, might have, with each coming of spring, a score of feathered friends returning from a faraway southern wintering. Nothing so civilizes and humanizes children as this care and interest. In Worcester, Massachusetts, in one district where the care and protection of birds have been taught to and inspired in the children of a public school, vandalism has ceased among the boys. They are busy providing bird-boxes, watching for nests in the trees, guarding the fledgings against cats and dogs, and their hearts have softened meanwhile. Were it only a measure for taming and civilizing boys, the taming of birds would be worth while. But what a minstry of delight do these angels of song and grace bring to old and young, when once we have taken them under our care! "Let but a bird-that being so free and uncontrolled, which with one stroke of the wing puts space between you and himself-let him be willing to draw near and conclude a friendship with you, and lo, how your heart is moved."-Mme. Michelet. J. H. Ackerman THE POWER OF LITERATURE. There are two ways of viewing any object: it may be viewed concretely and scientifically or it may be viewed in accordance with its aesthetic or moral value. As the result of the first we have knowledge; of the second, culture. Each has what in the widest sense must be called its body of literature. But how much stronger the literature of the second! How much more appealing to our innate love of the good, the beautiful! How much more moving to the human heart the artist's description of the tented field than the quartermaster's list of all the implements of war therein contained! What power lies within the artist's dream as compared with the bare realities of a sombre catalogue! Literature, the literature of power, is based upon real culture. How much then of our public school work ministers to the daily need of the pupil for moral and aesthetic education? Little of it except reading can be strictly put under the classification. Formerly this fact was considered of little importance and the child's nature was misjudged and in consequence starved. We now know that it is not the abnormal child alone who cares for literature, but all, even the every-day children around us are more or less susceptible to its influence. The childish appreciation of literature shown by great writers should not be taken to prove the lack of this appreciation in others, but rather to prove that a child may love a good book even as he does the sunlight or the quiet beauty of green fields and shining water courses. On account of the undue importance attached to facts as mere facts, for many years the child who was dull in their acquirement was never allowed to quicken his powers by delving in fable and romance. Now we are beginning to realize that a child as a child, or as he reaches the mysterious merging into manhood or womanhood, lays, for better or for worse, the foundations of his future taste for real or false jewels of literature. The literature of power should not be shut out of our elementary schools. Let its acquaintance be made through the medium of books and libraries, through tall buildings and broader opportunities, till our people shall be a people of growing literary pc ver, a people appreciative of poetry and the broader humanity, and shall be guided to the heart of poetry, humanity. to what in human is divine; and shall be led to love the beautiful within and "behold good in everything but sin." Peter H. Burnett A BIT OF LOGIC. I never knew so fine a population, as a whole community, as I saw in Oregon most of the time I was there. They were all honest, because there was nothing to steal; they were all sober, because there was no liquor to drink; there were no misers, because there was nothing to hoard; they were industrious, because it was work or starve. |