CHAPTER XXV.

THE FAREWELL.

When Washington had completed his two terms of office, he was unalterably fixed in his resolution to go back to private life. The reasons which had induced him to accept the presidency against his inclination were no longer forcible. The government was established. The country was on the road to prosperity. No one man any longer had it in his power greatly to help or greatly to hurt the people. Moreover he was weary of public life. He was tired of standing up and being pelted with mud by all sorts of obscure people; of having his motives misconstrued; of listening to the endless bickerings of public men about him. For more than twenty years he had really been at the head of the nation. Now he meant to go back to his farm; but before he went, he had it in him to say one word to his countrymen.

That Washington should write his famous “Farewell Address to the People of the United States,” indicates how accurately he understood his position. He was a great man, a splendid figure in history, and he knew it. But he was too great to be vain of his distinction. He was not too great to use even his distinction for the benefit of his country. He knew perfectly well that any speech which he might make when he retired from office would be listened to as almost no other political paper was ever listened to by a people, and he determined to gather into his “Farewell Address” the weightiest judgment which he could pronounce, as summing up the result of his long study and observation of public affairs. He wrote, of course, with a special eye to the needs of the people who were immediately to hear and read the address. They had dangers about them which have since largely disappeared; for example, we do not especially need to-day the caution which the men of that day needed when Washington wrote: “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.”

Nevertheless, the address is so full of sound political wisdom, that I wish it might be read in every public school in the land on the 22d day of February. In it, the large-minded Washington speaks, thinking of the whole country, and pouring into his words the ripe and full judgment of a man whose one thought in his life had been to serve his country faithfully.

The observance of Washington’s birthday began in a quiet way during Washington’s lifetime. As early as 1783, when the war was over, but before the treaty of peace was signed, some gentlemen met together to celebrate it, and during his presidency, the day was observed by members of Congress and others who paid their respects to him, and the observance of the day became more and more general, especially after Washington’s death.

The day before he was to leave office, Washington gave a farewell dinner to the Foreign Ministers and their wives, and eminent public men including the new President, John Adams. The company was in excellent spirits, until Washington raised his glass to wish them all good health, after the fashion of those days. He smiled and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the last time I shall drink your health as a public man; I do it with sincerity, wishing you all possible happiness.” Perhaps he was thinking at the moment of his own happiness in going back to private life; but it suddenly rushed over the minds of those present what such a toast meant, and all mirth was gone. The next day he attended the ceremonies of the inauguration of John Adams. As he moved toward the door to retire, there was a rush of the people toward him. They cheered and cheered as he passed into the street. He answered, smiling and waving his hat, his gray hairs blown by the wind. The people followed him to the door of his house. He turned, as he entered, and looked on them. Now it was his turn to feel the pain of parting. After all, he was going away from those busy haunts where he was sure to see men who honored and loved him. Tears stood in his eyes; his face was pale and grave; he raised his hand, but he could not trust himself to speak.

* * * * *

He was once more at Mount Vernon, in the quiet of his home, and again the days went by in that regular routine which suited him. Here is a letter which he wrote to James McHenry, the Secretary of War:

“I am indebted to you for several unacknowledged letters; but never mind that; go on as if you had answers. You are at the source of information, and can find many things to relate; while I have nothing to say that could either inform or amuse a Secretary of War in Philadelphia. I might tell him that I begin my diurnal course with the sun; that, if my hirelings are not in their places at that time I send them messages of sorrow for their indisposition; that, having put these wheels in motion, I examine the state of things further; that, the more they are probed, the deeper I find the wounds which my buildings have sustained by an absence and neglect of eight years; that, by the time I have accomplished these matters, breakfast (a little after seven o’clock, about the time, I presume, you are taking leave of Mrs. McHenry) is ready; that, this being over, I mount my horse and ride round my farms, which employs me until it is time to dress for dinner, at which I rarely miss seeing strange faces, come, as they say, out of respect for me. Pray, would not the word curiosity answer as well? And how different this from having a few social friends at a cheerful board! The usual time of sitting at table, a walk, and tea, bring me within the dawn of candle light; previous to which, if not prevented by company, I resolve, that, as soon as the glimmering taper supplies the place of the great luminary, I will retire to my writing-table and acknowledge the letters I have received; but when the lights are brought, I feel tired and disinclined to engage in this work, conceiving that the next night will do as well. The next night comes, and with it the same causes for postponement, and so on. This will account for your letter remaining so long unacknowledged; and, having given you the history of a day, it will serve for a year, and I am persuaded you will not require a second edition of it. But it may strike you, that in this detail no mention is made of any portion of time allotted for reading. The remark would be just, for I have not looked into a book since I came home; nor shall I be able to do it until I have discharged my workmen, probably not before the nights grow longer, when possibly I may be looking in Doomsday Book. At present I shall only add, that I am always and affectionately yours.”

But the time came when a letter to the Secretary of War was not a piece of pleasantry. There was imminent danger of war with France; Congress issued an order to raise an army, and President John Adams immediately nominated George Washington as Commander-in-Chief. The Senate promptly confirmed the nomination, and Washington accepted on two conditions: that the principal officers should be such as he approved, and that he should not be called into the field till the army required his presence. He did not think there would be war, but he believed the best way to prevent it was to show that the people were ready for it.

It was in March, 1797, that Washington left Philadelphia for Mount Vernon; in July, 1798, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief. He conducted most of his business by letter, though he spent a month in Philadelphia. He took up again the burden he had laid down, quietly, readily, since it was necessary, and without complaint; but he had not very long to bear it.

On December 12, 1799, he had been riding over his farms as usual, but a rain and sleet storm came up, and he returned to the house chilled through by the exposure. The next day was still stormy, and he kept indoors; but he had taken cold and suffered from a sore throat. He passed the evening with his family, however, read the papers and talked cheerfully. In the night he had an attack of ague, and on the next morning, which was Saturday the 14th, he breathed with difficulty, and messengers were sent for one doctor after another. He suffered acutely, but did not complain. Toward evening he said to Dr. Craik: “I die hard, but I am not afraid to die. I believed from my first attack that I should not survive it. My breath can not last long.” He said little more, only thanked his attendants for their kindness, and bade them give themselves no further trouble,—simply to let him die in quietness. Between ten and eleven o’clock that night he died.

Chief-Justice Marshall, when the news reached Congress, said a few simple words in the House of Representatives, and asked that a committee be appointed in conjunction with a committee of the Senate “to consider on the most suitable manner of paying honor to the memory of the man, _first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow-citizens_”; but no manner has been found more suitable than the study of that life which is the most priceless gift to America.

THE END.

THE CHILDREN’S EXHIBITION.

BY CHARLES BARNARD.

One morning last March there appeared in the New York newspapers an advertisement of a “Children’s Industrial Exhibition.” At first many persons could not imagine what it could be. But when the doors were opened and the reporters went to look at the exhibition, the newspapers began to tell of the many curious things to be seen in the hall. No such exhibition had ever been seen in New York, and then people began to wonder why one had not been held before. Now the true way to understand a thing is to look at it again and again. It so happened that I went to this exhibition several times, and that a ST. NICHOLAS artist went too, and so perhaps we can together give you an idea of the principal things that were on view at that curious show.

[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION.]

The exhibition was held in a large and handsome hall, and was arranged just like any grand fair intended to exhibit the artistic or mechanical achievements of men and women. There was only this difference: the objects to be seen were all made by little women and very youthful men. There were medals to be given for the best work, and there was a catalogue, and there were officials to explain everything to the visitors. Were there sums on slates, compositions, exercises or examples of penmanship? No. Better than these—very much better—there were real things made by boys and girls with their own hands, and, best of all, things made in school.

On entering the hall, however, the first objects to attract attention were those made by boys at home and out of school. These objects were arranged on tables by themselves, some of the work being by children in New York, and some by young folk in Yonkers. There were wood-carvings, hammered brasswork, drawings and designs, embroidery, and hundreds of curious things either useful or merely ornamental; models of boats, houses, shops, forts, and even a _carousel_ with woolly elephants that career madly around the ring whenever the clockwork is wound up. Some of the things were well made, but many were very poorly done, which shows that we must go to school to learn to make boats as well as to learn to do sums in long division. The work of the girls showed more training than that of the boys, and the sewing was very good,—some of the artistic sewing being worthy of high praise.

Speaking of sewing, our old ST. NICHOLAS friends, the kitchen-garden and the cooking-garden, were wonderfully displayed with full examples and models, and even a tea-table set in proper order precisely as arranged by the little housekeepers. The exhibit was well worth looking at, and there was always a crowd around the table, but for us it was chiefly interesting because there the noble art of sewing was demonstrated precisely as if it were a lesson in geography.

[Illustration: PART OF THE EXHIBIT BY THE CHILDREN OF YONKERS, NEW YORK.]

The true way to study about islands and capes and all the other divisions of land and water is to have some sand and water in a box, and then to build up the sand into miniature islands and capes, just like the real things out-of-doors. When I went to school, all the boys could say, “An island is a portion of land entirely surrounded by water,” and yet not a boy in the class knew that he lived on an island. So it is with sewing. The girls I knew years ago cried so hard over the long, dreary seams, that I used to be glad I was not a girl. But nowadays there is sewing without weeping: a neat box all ready for school,—with thimbles, needles, pins, thread, scissors; hundreds of pieces of cloth, basted and ready to be stitched; no dreary seams to tire young fingers, but easy graded lessons, like a needle-work kindergarten. And as we crossed the exhibition-hall, we saw another method. There on a long table were hundreds of garments and parts of garments made by the public-school girls of Philadelphia. There, in a frame, were all the lessons arranged in regular order, showing every step—hemming, over-seaming, back-stitching and running, reversible seam, felling, gathering, darning, and mending, up to the fine art of button-hole making. The girls are from eight to fifteen years of age, and that work they did in school, while attending to their regular school lessons. We passed on to the tables where the work of school-girls of Boston and New Haven and Hoboken was shown; and in every instance, we saw regular, graded lessons in needle-work, from the plainest hemming up to the finest embroidery. New York girls, too, in the schools of the Children’s Aid Society, in mission and church schools, showed by their samples that they also were students of stitchery. I saw one piece of sewing that seemed truly wonderful. It was in a glass case, and it was the “graduation exercises” of a young girl, fourteen years of age, on leaving Fräulein Calm’s school in Cassel, Germany. It consisted of half a yard of muslin ornamented with every kind of sewing that can be done on a machine; half a yard of dress fabric worked up by hand into the most beautiful pleatings, in a style that would bring tears of joy to the manly eyes of a ladies’ tailor; a piece of wonderful patching; and a square of darning so perfect that it was impossible to tell which was the new cloth, and which the old garment. Why, the girl must have been a finished dress-maker! She could earn good wages to-morrow by simply showing her “graduation exercise.” And as we turned to a dozen other exhibits in the hall, we saw more sewing, from the work of the first class in hemming up to that of the little dress-makers, who could cut, fit, and make their own clothes.

What can boys do? Judging by their grand exhibit, we thought to ourselves “they can do almost anything!” Some boys who attend one of the uptown schools on the east side had formed a club for home work and study in mechanics, and there was a table filled with their work. It was chiefly models in wood of real things the boys had seen—a crane, a dumb-waiter, a stone-saw, a pile-driver, and other mechanical implements. It was all excellent work, but it was home work done out of school hours.

[Illustration: EXHIBIT OF THE HEBREW TECHNICAL INSTITUTE.]

The opposite table showed school work done by the boys of the Hebrew Technical Institute. Those young master mechanics, it seems, attended school every day and at the same time learned the use of tools, the pencil, the saw, the hammer, and the plane. First of all, every boy had to learn to draw, not merely to make a pretty picture of something, but to make a regular working-drawing, so that the real thing could be constructed from it, and so that when the thing is finished, the drawing will be a true picture of it, whatever it may be. So we found there regular graded lessons in drawing, and in making joints in wood, and in construction. As the boy improves, he studies pattern-making and learns to make a mold from the pattern, and to melt lead and make a casting. We saw all the carpentry lessons arranged in order, and glanced at every lesson a boy has to take, from learning to draw to making a step-ladder. There were stools, tables, small bureaus, and other furniture made, finished, stained, and varnished by boys in the school. There was even a window-frame ready to put in the wall of a house, with sash, blinds, and all, complete and in working order; and the boy who made it was only fourteen years old.

There are in every school queer girls or odd boys who somehow fail often and are at the foot of every class. These children may be as bright as any, but there is nothing in the school to bring them out. In this exhibition we found the work of some such girls and boys. They see beautiful things in fields and wood, and they have wise teachers. It is not every child that can express itself in a composition. These boys and girls express the ideas that are in them with a pencil. They study real, living things, plants and flowers, and they learn to place the forms of these things on paper and add to them something of their own day-dreams, and soon every one who sees them exclaims: “What beautiful designs!” These so-called dull children who never can understand the multiplication table, and who shed useless tears over the tables of weights and measures, here find the right kind of school for them: and they appeared, with their work, in this children’s exhibition, as bright, as interested, as eager to learn as any prize-medal scholar in any grammar school.

Now we must not think that only the quiet, thoughtful girls can do such work. Every child has some sense of beauty; the trouble is that unless it is given instruction in such things, it will probably never, except by accident, find out what it can do. They are wiser about such things in Chicago.

On the wall of the exhibition-room, under the gallery, was a grand display of work, and so arranged that we could see just what every child in the public schools of Chicago studies from year to year. The pictures were arranged in three rows to illustrate the different kinds of work; and below the pictures, on a long table, was a collection of little models, made by the children in the schools. There were balls, cubes, and pyramids shaped in clay by little hands. Even the youngest children in primary schools can do this. Why, it is only fun, to shape the soft clay! Of course, every little seven-year-old fellow is in a hurry every morning to get to so grand a school, where he learns what a cube is by making a true, fair cube in soft clay. Having learned to make various shapes in clay, he then learns to make simple outlines of the same objects by placing straws together in those shapes on his desk. Next, he can go one step further, and with a pair of scissors cut cardboard into shapes that represent those forms. Then he can proceed to use these shapes in various ways to make designs, or he can cut in paper or in white wood, with a scroll-saw, pretty figures suggested by the clay-models. He can even make new lines on the old shapes, and decorate the clay forms he first made.

If your teacher tells you that a cube is a “rectangular parallelopiped, which has its six sides squares,” you may think it is all right, and say it after him without tripping, and yet not have the least notion that the wooden blocks on which you learned your letters were all cubes. This Chicago youngster would not use those dreadful words to describe a cube. He would make one and give you a picture of it. Did he not construct one out of wet clay? He knows a cube anywhere, and he will never forget it. All his life long he will see cubes of every size, and he will know in an instant whether they are true cubes with all the six sides truly square. And if you give him a piece of paper, he will cut it out into a perfect cross, and then fold it up in a certain way and make a box that is a cube. Besides all this, his cubes are ornamented, so that he is already an artist, and enjoys making things beautiful.

The picture here given shows the three ways in which the Chicago primary scholar works. At the base are the forms he constructs in clay; then the outlines made of bits of straw; then the figures cut out of cardboard; and finally the decorated figures made from these forms. In this way, he studies construction or making things; representation, or picture-making; and decoration, or the making of beautiful figures that are like the things he constructed and represented. We walked along that beautiful exhibit and saw hundreds of things molded in clay or cut out of soap or carved in wood, and then saw the drawings and ornaments made from those things. We perceived just how the Chicago boy or girl goes on from work with straw to simple drawings on a slate, and then to finished drawings in pencil on paper, until we wondered if every child in Chicago is to be an artist.

[Illustration: PART OF THE EXHIBIT BY THE CHICAGO PUBLIC-SCHOOLS.]

Next to that fine display of children’s work from Chicago came a series of drawings by the pupils of the schools of Worcester, Mass. Here, too, we find the boys and girls making drawings of real things that they have made themselves or that were made by others. The first drawings are to show how the things are constructed, the others to show how they look. Then the pupils take flowers or other objects and make from them original designs that may be used for decoration. In this exhibit, too, were beautiful pictures in water-colors to show that the young artists understood the harmony of colors. If the exhibition had shown us nothing more than the admirable work by those Massachusetts boys and girls, it would have well repaid us for coming.

[Illustration: PART OF THE EXHIBIT BY THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF WORCESTER, MASS.]

Next to the Worcester exhibit stood the New Haven tables. What fine times those New England children must have! Here we found more drawings, by Connecticut boys and girls, showing that they also know how things are made, and how they look on paper. Here, too, were more of those curious shapes, cut out of paper, to be folded up into cubes and prisms, cylinders and pyramids. There even were little pots and pans, cut out of paper, every part made by itself from a drawing, and the little model made by pasting the parts together. What an easy way that must be to study squares and circles, parallel lines and the whole family of angles! New Haven boys will never stumble over that trying old question, as to the difference between two square feet and two feet square. They learn all about it in a new kind of game with scissors and paper and a pot of paste. We might spend hours in looking over the work of those New Haven boys and girls—the handsome furniture, the neat sewing and pretty embroidery, the “busy work” of kindergarten tots, and the carpentry work of the big boys; and the more we studied that school work, the more we should wish, probably, that all schools were like those schools.

[Illustration: SEWING-KIT FURNISHED TO GIRL PUPILS OF THE PHILADELPHIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS. SAMPLES OF WORK.]

Leaving the New Haven tables we came to the grand exhibit made by the school-children of Philadelphia. In that city, there are twenty-five thousand girls studying plain sewing every week of the school year. The piled-up tables loaded with sewing showed only a small part of the work. On other tables we could see excellent designs and work in hammered brass, fine carvings, and even furniture and stamped leather-work. Then there was one very interesting table. On the wall above it were working drawings showing how wooden joints of all kinds are made; and on the table itself were dovetails, mortises and tenons admirably done in wood. There too were pieces of cast iron chipped and filed into various shapes. Very few workmen in shops could do better, and yet all we saw was the work of public-school boys.

[Illustration: SAMPLES OF JOINING-WORK IN WOOD AND METAL, SENT BY THE PHILADELPHIA MANUAL TRAINING SCHOOL.]

As we turned away from those tables, we saw another marked “St. Louis.” Here was shown more work by little hands, more drawings, too, and all proving that those Western youngsters are having happy times in school with busy fingers. Next, we came upon some excellent drawings by pupils of a South End Industrial School at Boston. The boys of that school have a printing-press, and the girls can make bread as well as trim bonnets, for they exhibited both the hats and the loaves. Jamestown, in New York, is also teaching its boys and girls to work with their hands, and some of their work in the exhibition is excellent.

Did you ever think what it is to be blind?—to be unable to tell whether the paper you hold in your hand is white or blue or some other color. How could we do anything if we could not see? But in the Children’s Exhibition, on a table covered with knitting and fancy work of blind children, was the strangest display of all—kindergarten work made by a hundred blind girls and boys! No bad work in it either; it all was neat and perfect. Yet those children have never seen the work their young hands have made.

[Illustration: PART OF THE EXHIBIT SENT BY THE MANUAL TRAINING SCHOOL OF CHICAGO.]

A boy may lose a foot or a leg and be a cripple all his life. Shall he give up in despair and do nothing, or beg, which would be even worse? No. He has his hands and a brave heart. He will have a manly spirit even if he has a broken body. Well, on a table near the blind children’s work, was a collection of brooms and brushes,—new, well-made brushes, as good as you can find, and all made by the young workmen of the Crippled Boys’ Brush Shop in New York.

There, too, were tables loaded with work from four orphan asylums in New York and Brooklyn, and we saw sewing, bread-making, net-making and cabinet-work done by young hands that have lost their hold on fathers’ and mothers’ fingers. Other friendly hands are leading them to be useful and skillful in many good works.

We may have been accustomed to think of Indian boys and girls as little savages, unable to do anything except to use a bow and arrow or to take care of the wigwam. But the exhibition included also a display of objects made by Indian children at school. There was a set of harness, a pair of shoes, and some sensible coffee-pots made by Indian boys and girls. Like so many others, they are learning to use their hands.

We may pity those halt and blind, those neglected children from the wilderness, and those little ones who have known grief; but see how brave they are! They have wiped away all tears and found it sweet and wise to learn to work, to forget their griefs in industry. Depend upon it, if we had learned nothing more by coming to this exhibition than this, we should have learned a great deal—that work is a cure for many ills, that work actually means happiness.

[Illustration: WORKING-DRAWINGS AND MODEL OF A SUSPENSION BRIDGE. DRAWN AND CONSTRUCTED BY THE BOYS OF THE GRAMERCY PARK SCHOOL.]

Near the door of the main hall was a fine model of a suspension bridge with towers and cables complete. Beneath it were drawings showing how the bridge was made. This was the work of the boys of the Gramercy Park School and Tool-house Association. They drew the plans, and constructed the model bridge from the working drawings. They built up the foundations and towers, piece by piece, and strung the cables and suspended the roadway. All, too, while the builders were attending school and without loss of time from their regular lessons.

[Illustration: EXHIBIT BY THE CRIPPLED BOYS’ BRUSH FACTORY.]

And even now I have not told you of half the things in that beautiful exhibition. As we sat there, people were flocking in, young and old, teachers and pupils, eager to see what children can do.

And now, what does it all mean? Let us have a little talk about it.

To that exhibition, more than four thousand children sent the work of their hands. We do not think of them as Western children, as Eastern boys, or New York girls, as Hebrews, Catholics, as orphans, or blind, or anything else. They are children at school, and there is the wonder of it all. It is plain their schools are not like other schools and are very different from those I saw when a boy. It is plain that those children can do many things that children without their advantages can not do. And besides, they are probably happier than any children who ever went to school before.

Let us see why this is so. Most children go to primary school and then to grammar school and perhaps to high school and college, or to some private school. This exhibition plainly shows us that there is a new kind of school, that there are new lessons and new teachers coming. Books we must have. To learn, we must read; but we may read all about boats, and yet we can never learn to sail a boat till we take the tiller in hand and trim the sail before the breeze. The book will help wonderfully in telling us the names of things in the boat and, if we have read about sailing, we shall more quickly learn to sail; but we certainly never shall learn till we are in a real boat. We can read in a book how to turn a heel in knitting, and may commit to memory whole rules about “throwing off two and purl four,” and all the rest; yet where is the girl who can learn to knit without having the needles in her hands?

This then is the idea of the new school—to use the hands as well as the eyes. Boys and girls who go to the ordinary schools, where only books are used, will graduate knowing a great deal; but a boy who goes to one of these new schools, where, besides the books, there are pencils and tools, work-benches as well as writing-books, will know more. The other boys and girls may forget more than half they read, but he will remember everything he learned at the drawing-table or at the work-bench, as long as he lives. He will also remember more of that which he reads because his work with his hands helps him to understand what he reads.

[Illustration: EXHIBIT OF THE AMATEUR TECHNICAL UNION.]

Again, a boy who goes to one of the new schools, where once a week he spends two hours in a shop, and works with his hands, say to make a square block of wood “true,”—exact to the hundredth part of an inch,—will soon see that bad work is not square, is not true and fair. A piece of false work will seem ugly and show bad workmanship. He will go out of the shop proud that he can do true work; and all false things, whether in wood or only in thought, will seem bad and wrong to that boy. He can not make a crooked joint in woodwork and be satisfied; neither is he likely to be content with crooked work in word or deed.

The four thousand children whose work filled that exhibition hall, read books and study lessons precisely as do you; but they do more. For two, or perhaps four, hours every week they lay down their books and take up those splendid tools, the pencil, the needle, the hammer, the saw, and the file. Are they any less readers than those who only read? No; they are better readers, because they are workers; because by work they better understand reading.

I remember long ago a tear-stained book of tables of weights and measures, and a teacher’s impatience with a stupid child who could not master the “tables.” And I have seen a school where the tables were written on a blackboard—thus: “two pints are equal to one quart,” and on a stand in the school-room was a tin pint measure and a tin quart measure, and a box of dry sand. Every happy youngster had a chance to fill that pint with sand and pour the sand in the quart measure. Two pints filled it. He knew it. Did he not see it, did not every boy try it? Ah! Now they knew what it all meant. It was as plain as day that two pints of sand were equal to one quart of sand; and with merry smiles those six-year-old philosophers learned the tables of measures; and they will never forget them. This is, in brief, what is meant by industrial education. To learn by using the hands,—to study from things as well as from books. This is the new school, these are the new lessons. The children who can sew, or design, or draw, or carve wood, or do joinering work, or cast metals, or work in clay and brass, are the best-educated children, because they use their hands as well as their eyes and their brains.

You may say that in such schools all the boys will become mechanics, and all the girls become dress-makers. Some may, many will not; and yet whatever they do, be it preaching, keeping a store, or singing in concerts, they will do their work better than those who only read in books. The new schools are the best schools. Will there not be more of them every year? I think parents will see that it is an excellent thing for all boys and girls to learn to use their hands, that not to use the hands at all is to be helpless in the great school we all attend when we are men and women. The exhibition held last March may be only the beginning of a new education wherein the hard lessons of the books, that no little fellow ever could understand, shall give place to bright and interesting books about work and about things. There may yet be shops in every schoolyard, and embroidery frames on every girl’s desk. There will be books, of course, and there also may be tools. There will be examinations indeed, but there may also be in every town an exhibition like the one I have told you of; and the fathers and mothers and all the good people flocking to the schools may see what the children can do with their hands. There will be speeches and recitations and music as now, and there may also be drawings and brasswork, embroidery, and designs in clay and in wood; and every child may be able to work as well as to study. No more tears over unmeaning lessons, but everywhere pleasure and interest because study is joined to work, and to learning is added industry.

THE TELL-TALE BARN.

BY ESTHER B. TIFFANY.

Oh, the funny little barn on a hill-side near our town! With two wee, squinting windows in a row, And a great wide-open door-way, like the mask-mouth of a clown, It seems to be forever saying, “Oh!” “Oh!” cries the little barn; “Oh!” If you break a china dish Or run away to fish, “Oh!” cries the little barn; “Oh!”

One morning very early, we stole two pumpkin pies, And thought we’d go and eat them by the lake, But when we looked behind us, there stared those watchful eyes, And oh, they stared so hard it made us quake! And “Oh!” cried the little barn; “Oh!” If you stole a pumpkin pie To eat it on the sly, “Oh!” cried the little barn; “Oh!”

“I tell you now,” said Jenny, “the old thing won’t keep still Until we put those pies right back, I know. Let’s slip ’round to the pantry and lay them on the sill, Or it will wake the folks up shouting, ‘Oh!’” For, “Oh!” cried the little barn; “Oh!” Till we put away those pies Before its very eyes, “Oh!” cried the little barn; “Oh!”

[Illustration]

WONDERS OF THE ALPHABET.

BY HENRY ECKFORD.

As I have already told you, men can convey ideas to one another by making various kinds of marks. They can also speak to one another without using spoken words, by means of gestures. Animals likewise gesticulate, though in a much cruder way. You have probably seen deaf-mutes converse, eying one another sharply while their fingers kept fluttering and their features working in a lively play of expression. They were speaking a silent language, which is the motion-language of animals and the signal-language of savages carried to the highest point. Watch in any black berry patch the large brown thrush, the cat-bird, or the chewink. Every motion of the bird as it bustles about, is unconcerned. But let it catch sight of you, or let its eyes fall on snake or hawk or cat, and you will see the difference in its motions. Four-footed wild animals exhibit different emotions, such as anger or alarm, by various movements of the head and limbs.

Among savage nations, like our Indians and the wild tribes of Asia, whose nomadic habits cause their languages to become distinct from one another even when they belong to the same parent stock, and where intercourse is apt to be dangerous on account of feuds, the language of gestures has been wonderfully developed. A Zuñi will signal to an Apache, his enemy, and sustain a very full conversation with him across one of those tremendous canyons which are the marvel of our Southwest. For instance, putting the hand to the cheek and inclining the head means “sleep.” Touching the heart means, “I am sincere.” Thrusting forward the two fingers from the lips, to imitate the forked tongue of the snake, means, “you tell lies.”

The lower orders of people in Italy have always been famous for quickness in making and reading signals, and a Neapolitan is often as expert as an Indian of the plains in the language of signals; in fact, he is smarter, for he will even talk by means of it to one of his kind while a stranger remains unconscious that they are communicating with each other before his face.

Some writers have argued that our letters must have been developed from signs once drawn roughly to indicate gestures made by the human limbs. An ingenious person has proposed an entirely new alphabet, which he considers much quicker and more sensible than our own. It is based on gestures natural to mankind and reduced from those which he considers the most important. But into this and into the endless varieties of short-hand writings and abbreviated writings proposed by inventors in what is called stenography, tachygraphy, and other strange-looking words selected from the Greek dictionary, we can not enter.

By sounds, too, ideas are conveyed between animals and between men. As used by mankind, we call the sounds speech; owing to the gulf that man in his pride wishes to set between himself and beasts, we call the sounds made by animals anything rather than speech. When your dog wags its tail, it uses a sort of gesture language. But when it barks, does it not speak? If you ever saw the great actor Salvini play “Othello,” you will remember that he uses cries, like those of animals, to express rage, grief, or remorse, which are too great to find the measured relief of words. Birds sing their happiness and cry their distress. Between the disconsolate mewing of the cat-bird and its rich song of gladness at sunset, while the mother is safe on the nest, the difference is astonishing; so is the difference between the mellow song of the brown thrush and its squirrel-like bark at the certainty of danger, or its vicious clucking and hissing when its nest is found and touched. Jays have a discordant cry, but also a charming bell-like call note, which sounds rarely in the deep pine forests. Even fish sometimes make voluntary sounds, while the cries of our frogs and toads and insects, which make the wilderness joyous, at times are deafening. Animals, as a rule, have some kind of speech, however rude, however occasional may be its use.

But such marks as animals leave on sand or wood, in grass or bushes, can hardly be called writing by the widest interpretation, for they lack intention. To be sure, when the grizzly bear rears its ugly bulk against a redwood-tree and gashes the loose bark in order to stretch its claws, it leaves a sign behind which some animals, particularly those of its own race and those on which it most preys, undoubtedly can read. But the nearest approach, in an animal, to intentional acts designed to be seen or enjoyed by others, is the decoration of its curious house by the bower-bird of New Guinea. A pair of these birds will build an arbor of twigs and leaves for no apparent purpose except their own amusement, and then decorate it with bright feathers and stones, as if they experienced pleasure in looking at it and wished other birds or creatures to see it. But even this is far from the rudest beginnings of writing.

Man writes from forethought and for the instruction of himself and others. Speech is a gift; writing an invention. Speech we share with the animals. Those parts of speech which we call ejaculations can not be separated from the cries of animals. You may have heard man called the talking animal. Would it not be better to call him the writing animal? His invention of writing separates him more than does articulate speech, from the lower orders of animate beings. No matter now how far back we go, or how far down we dig through the earth’s crust to the layers of soil deposited nobody knows how long ago, wherever we find things fashioned by men, we find pictures that show the groping toward some kind of writing. Now, it is a portrait of a horse carved in outline on a piece of bone; at another time, it is a mammoth attacked by a hunter under cover of a wolf-skin. The difference between the brains of man and the brains of the highest animals is so great that, however we may suspect from other things that there was an age when men were little stronger in wits than the apes, we have as yet no certainty where and when a race of men lived who could not at least draw a picture in outline. The Bushmen, an African nation thought to be the lowest of living men in intellect, are now known to be marvelously expert in drawing. They cover the walls of their caves with well-drawn portraits of wild beasts.

So you see that the alphabet, which you learn at an age so early that you forget its difficulties, is perhaps the most curious and marvelous contrivance that has been produced by the brain of man. It is so old, that its origin is lost in the perspective of the past. To reconstruct its history is extremely difficult. The further back we go, the more confused are the records, and the scantier they become; but those which we find seem to point originally to a great variety of writings. The general history seems to be that of simpler from less simple—simpler pictures from complex pictures, simpler alphabets from alphabets more complex. Then a few chosen alphabets outlived all the rest; and finally one form, in great variation to be sure, rules now throughout a great portion of the whole world.

This, as you have seen, is the alphabet which we share with so many nations of different speech, color, and ancestry. Still, only half satisfied with the derivation of this alphabet, we ask, whence did it come to the Phœnicians? Was it evolved on Egyptian soil? Or did the Phœnicians perfect it from some old syllabary like those which I have already described to you. A syllabary of the ancient Hittites of Palestine has just been discovered and partly made out. Attempts have been made to trace it to the cuneiform picture-writing at Babylon, which also I have told you about; and some have thought it may have been born in India, out of a vanished syllabary, and its origin completely forgotten because of wars and the destruction of monuments. Or perhaps some very early or forgotten emigration of people from Asia into Egypt may have carried with it a crude alphabet, which, after further changes, was carried by another and a seafaring people, the Phœnicians, to the nations about the Mediterranean. One of David’s captains was Uriah the Hittite. More and more is being learned nowadays about the Hittites, or Khetas, a Semitic nation that conquered and held Egypt for many centuries, long before David’s time. It is thought by some that Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery while the Hittites ruled over the patient Egyptians, who abhorred them and their gods. There seems to have been no difficulty on the part of Joseph and his brothers in making themselves understood by Potiphar and the Pharaoh that sat on the throne. If the ruling class was Semitic at the time, the court speech of the day was doubtless a dialect something like Hebrew, and this explains also why the starving sons of Jacob turned to Egypt for grain. The Hittites are considered the same people as the Khetas, the same also as the Shepherd Kings whom the Egyptians called the Hyksos. Perhaps it was during the reign of the Hyksos, or Hittites, and while the Hebrews were increasing mightily in numbers, and gradually falling under the displeasure of their rulers in Egypt, that the Phœnicians, their seafaring relatives, adapted those twenty-two letters from the great store of signs and symbols accumulated by long lines of Egyptian priests.

You have seen that the origin of the letters of our alphabet has been attributed to many different sources. One has been sought in the signal or gesture language, common to savage man, still used by civilized man under certain circumstances, and not unknown in its most general features to the lower animals. You may remember that the forms of letters have been traced back by some to the shapes of trees, and by others to the shapes of animals. The best reasoned origin of the Phœnician alphabet ascribes it to rude pictures of gods, men, animals, plants, and objects.

A young man came to one of the wisest Jewish Rabbis to be a disciple.

“My son,” asked the Rabbi, “what is your occupation?”

“I am a scribe,” he replied.

“Then,” exclaimed the Rabbi; “be thou conscientious, O my son, for thy work is God-like!”

Many nations have held that their letters were the suddenly inspired inventions of demi-gods; others have maintained that only a god could have given so useful and admirable a thing to man. The divine origin of letters has been asserted in twenty different tongues. You have seen how many different earthly objects have been suggested as the source of letters. A Frenchman named Moreau de Dammartin, a Member of the French Institute, claimed that the letters of the alphabet were derived from the constellations which lie on the path of the earth around the sun; and certain old star-readers believed that they could read men’s characters and destinies by the aid of the constellations from which Dammartin derived the letters of the alphabets. And to-day there are people who claim to read men’s characters from their handwriting alone. As the writing of every nation is distinguished by certain strong national peculiarities, it is easy for an expert to decide to what nation a writer belongs. Having settled that, certain large characteristics which are common to all men, but in different degrees, can be seen in every handwriting. A certain number of men are calm, even-lived, sensible, and practical. Men of that class are almost certain to write plain, round hands in which every letter is distinctly legible; neither very much slanted forward, nor tilted backward; no letter very much bigger than its neighbor, nor with heads much above or tails much below the letters not so distinguished; the letters all having about the same general uprightness, and the lines true to the edges of the paper, neither tending upward nor downward. Exact, business-like people will have an exact handwriting. Fantastic minds revel in quirks and streamers, particularly for the capital letters, and this quality is not infrequent in certain business hands, as if the writers found a relief from the prosaic nature of their work in giving flourishes to certain letters. Firm, decided, downright men are apt to bear on the pen while writing, and to make their strokes hard and thick. On the contrary, people who are not sure of themselves, and are lacking in self-control, press unevenly, and with anxious-looking, scratchy hands. Ambitious people are apt to be overworked; they are always in haste and either forget to cross their t’s, or dot their i’s. They are also apt to run the last few letters of every word into an illegible scrawl. Besides those who do this naturally, there are others, silly or young people, who imitate the illegibleness in the handwriting of some one whom they admire. Flurried, troubled, and conscience-twinged persons have a crabbed and uneven handwriting. From all this it will appear that the claim of those who try to read character from handwritings is not so absurd as some people imagine.

I have now tried to tell you as plainly as possible the main facts about our alphabet so far as its history has been puzzled out. Those who are not afraid of large words, and wish to learn at greater length, should read the articles on the alphabet in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” and also in “Appleton’s Cyclopædia,” and especially the two large volumes called “The Alphabet,” written by Mr. Isaac Taylor. The number of special books and treatises in French, German, and English, bearing on different languages and their alphabets is too great to mention here.

We are taught the alphabet so soon after infancy that we naturally underrate its importance all our lives. Yet, who shall measure its importance to civilization? Writing has enabled mankind to store up knowledge. There are calculations and speculations which require so much straining of the mind, that advance to them and beyond them would have been impossible without the stepping-stones furnished by writing. For calculations, numerals and algebraic letters are the stepping-stones; for speculations, words and frequent sentences. The storing of ideas in books is often badly done, and people are always ready to groan over the vast accumulations of volumes and the very small proportion of ideas worth preserving. Yet, until volumes became general and no longer the mysterious conjuring books of the few, human knowledge was always more or less in danger of being swept from the earth by accidents to the few and scattered libraries. The more widely a book was spread in copies over the world, the less was the chance of its total disappearance. The printing-press aided in this kind of insurance of the knowledge of man against accidents. And neither printing-press nor alphabet need yet be considered as perfected. Our alphabet is not the best ever invented, but it is short and handy. As a subject for study, it yields to nothing that is connected intimately with the civilization of mankind. When we understand the history of the alphabet in all its course, and in all its minor points, we shall know the history of mankind ever since men first began to diverge widely from the beasts of the wood.

THE END.

[Illustration: THE LITTLE BOYS WHO LOOKED ALIKE.

BY MALCOLM DOUGLAS.]

Oh, never yet were little boys so much alike as they! Each looked more like the other than himself, folks used to say. And since no one between them any difference could tell Some incidents quite undeserved the two at times befell.

Their mother was so puzzled about telling which was which That it made it very awkward when she had to use her switch; And it frequently would happen that the guilty one went free, While his righteous little brother would be placed across her knee.

When either of the little boys was vexed with childish ills The good old doctor soon would bring his castor oil and squills, And, in spite of tears and protests, he would very often make The well one swallow all his horrid doses, by mistake.

Though one at school was always head, the teacher had to put The other (who would never learn his lessons) at the foot; So the bright boy for his indolence was ofttimes sternly chid, And the dull one patted on the head for what his brother did.

And sometimes, too, the cook would make a little pie for one, And give it to the other just as soon as it was done; And, to keep the first from crying, she would roll him out one more, But the second, when he came again, would get it, as before.

Oh, never yet were little boys so much alike as they! Each looked more like the other than himself, folks used to say. And since no one between them any difference could tell, Surprising and unjust rewards the two at times befell!

THE KELP-GATHERERS.

[_A Story of the Maine Coast._]

BY J. T. TROWBRIDGE.