GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE AUG 2 1 1956 LIBRARY That which makes a good Constitution must keep it, viz.: men of wisdom and virtue; 74080 N. C. SCHAEFFER, EDITOR. LANCASTER, PA.: 1899. . We have had more than one end in view in the Memorial few years in honor of Dr. Higbee, Dr. Burrowes and Thaddeus Stevens. Our first end was special, that Pennsylvania might know and duly honor these men for their unselfish devotion to the cause of general education. The second, that their portraits might go upon the walls of school rooms everywhere to aid in encouraging the placing of more pictures, and good ones, in the schools of the State. The importance of ornamenting the walls of the school-room-the benefit that may result from it, and therefore the necessity and the duty involved— is felt, as it should be, by few teachers and school officers. This item of the school equipment is no less essential in the ideal school than text-books or furniture. If it is a very good thing to hang attractive pictures on the wall of the home, then is it doubly so thus to ornament the walls of the school-room. "In the emptiest room," says Ruskin, "the mind wanders most, for it gets restless like a bird for want of a perch, and casts about for any possible means of getting out and away. Bare walls are not a proper part of the means of education; blank plaster about and above them is not suggestive to pupils." The landscape makes a bright opening through the dead wall like a window; flowers and ferns are suggestive of the garden, the lane, the field, the woods, the purling stream; of song-birds in the air or among the branches, and blue sky overhead. Animals suggest a life with which we should be more or less familiar. The portrait speaks the man, what we know of him, suggesting trains of thought that may be most interesting and profitable. A mother wondered why her three brave lads had all gone to sea from an inland home. She was speaking, in her loneliness, with a friend who had called upon her, and she could not suggest any reason why they should all have adopted the sea-faring life when none of their friends or relatives had been sailors. The man observed a spirited picture of a full-rigged ship hanging above the mantel. It was perhaps the only picture in the room, at least the only one at all conspicuous. A thought struck him. "How long has that picture been hanging there?" he asked. “Oh, it has been there ever since the boys were little children." "It was that," said he, "that sent your boys away. The sea grew upon their imagination until they longed for it, and sought it, and so they are gone." So a striking or attractive picture, in the school-room as in the home, may sink deep into the heart of the child, and mean far more to him than much of the work which the school programme usually imposes. He may forget the name and lose all recollection of the personality of the teacher and of most of his schoolmates, but the striking picture is a picture still. That he will always remember. In our experience as we grow older, if we are at all observant, we know more and more the value of these things-how great a factor in education they may become! Men wonder sometimes how they can expend a modest sum of money to good purpose in giving pleasure and profit to others. Get some pictures of good faces, and flowers, and landscapes, and other proper subjects, and put them upon the walls of your nearest school-house, or of some other in which you may be interested. When you have done this for one school you may want to do it for a second, or you will suggest to some other generous heart the like gift of enduring value. What chance have boys and girls with a dead-alive teacher in a schoolhouse whose blank walls are eloquent of poverty? Oh, the weariness of it! Real, genuine, helpful, beautiful art is now brought within reach of the million. The arts of chromo-lithography and half-tone engraving are putting exquisite pictures, at low cost, wherever there is taste to appreciate and enjoy them. In our homes they are everywhere, why not everywhere also upon school-room walls? Let us abate the poverty of taste which keeps our school-room walls bare of these choice educational influences. To many a child good pictures come like the ministration of the angels. We feel this, we know it; and for the years remaining to us shall do what we can to make school-life better for the pictures on the wall.-J. P. McCaskey. FORMERLY the walkers were three, Now, alas! one of them walks no longer on earth. The hills that knew him so well know him no more. The asters and goldenrod bloom, but he comes not to gather them. The maples redden, but he comes not to see them. Yet in a better and truer sense he is with us still; for we remember him, and continually talk of him. If we pass a sphagnum bog, we think how at this point he used to turn aside and put a few mosses into his box. Some professor in Germany, or a scholar in New Haven, had asked him to collect additional specimens. In those days of his sphagnum absorption we called him sometimes the "sphagnostic." If we are on the Landaff road, my companion asks, "Do you remember the Sunday noon when we went home and told E that this wood was full of his rare willow? And how he posted over here by himself directly after dinner to see it? And how he said, in a tone of whimsical entreaty, 'Please don't find it anywhere else; we must not let it become too common.'' Oh, yes, I remember; and my companion knows he has no need to remind me of it; but he loves to talk of the absent,-and he knows I love to hear him. That willow I can never see anywhere without thinking of the man who first told me about it. Whether I pass the single small specimen between Franconia and the Profile House, so close upon the highway that the road-menders are continually cutting it back, or the one on the No. 1. Bethlehem road, or the great cluster of stems on Wallace Hill, it will always be his willow. And indeed this whole beautiful hill country is his. How happy he was in it!.. The very roadsides here must miss him, and wonder why he no longer passes, with his botanical box over his shoulder and an opera-glass in his hand,-equally ready for a plant or a bird. He was always looking for something, and always finding it. With his happiness, his goodness, his gentle dignity, his philosophic temper, his knowledge of his own mind, his love of all things beautiful, he has made Franconia a dear place for all of us who knew him here. No man lives to himself. He could not if he would. The covetous man has a miser for his son, the light woman has a daughter hastening towards the ways of shame, the unclean man poisons workshop with his lecherous imagination, the drunkard infects a whole neighborhood with his vices, the swearer finds his little child, scarce out of babyhood, uttering bestial oaths, and shaping his tiny lips in the blasphemies which are the common speech of the house in which he lives. Who knows how far a word may travel? When it leaves us it is gone forever. It has floated away into the blue heaven on wings of its own, and we cannot recall it if we would. It has set new thoughts stirring in a score of hearts, and will travel on in multiplying influence till the ears of men may be full of it. Each man lives in a huge whispering gallery, and |