of great trees, as large as any you children ever saw, and pretty bright rivers ran through those forests, and nice birds sang in the branches, and great stags eat the grass underneath; we will read about the stag at some other time.  This was many hundred years ago, and there were very few people living then in Ireland, and by degrees, when the trees got very old, they began to fall down into the rivers and stopped them up, so that the water could not flow on, and the rivers overflowed all the nice forests, and the trees all fell, so that when some hundred years passed they were all down, and the branches rotted, and the grass and clay became wet, like sponge, and the whole of the nice shady forests of great trees became what we call bogs, and the remains of those pretty branches and leaves, where the birds used to sing so sweetly, has become turf, like this piece which we have for a lesson; and when men are cutting this turf out, they often find the great trunks of those trees, that many hundred years ago were so green and beautiful, quite black and ugly, but still so hard that they can scarcely be cut, and these old trees are called bog-oak, and the cabinet-maker buys them and makes them into beautiful chairs, and tables, and presses, and many other things, and they are quite black, and when polished you little children might see your faces in them.  Thus you see, my little children, that there is nothing which God has made which is not very wonderful and curious, even this piece of bog-turf, which you would not have heard about if you did not come to the infant school to learn about so many useful and curious things.

This will perhaps be enough of information for one lesson; and having thus infused it in an agreeable form into their minds, you may proceed in the manner before mentioned to get it back from them, in order to impress it more firmly on their understandings; and if this be always done in the proper manner, they will become as familiar with the subject, and learn it as quickly as they would the tissue of nonsense contained in the common nursery tales of “Jack and Jill,” or, “the old woman and her silver penny,” whose only usefulness consists in their ability to amuse, but from which no instruction can be possibly drawn; beside which, they form in the child’s mind the germ of that passion for light reading which afterwards, in many instances, prevents an application to any thing solid or instructive.  Being in themselves the foundation stone on which a huge and useless mass of fiction is piled in after years, the philosophical mind will at once perceive the advantage of our system of amusement mingled with instruction, and perceive that upon its simple basis a noble structure may be afterwards raised; and minds well stored with useful lore, and capable of discerning evil in whatever shape it presents itself, and extracting honey from every object, will be farmed, which, when they become numerous, will cause a glorious change in the moral world, the first germ of which will be traced to the properly managed gallery lessons of an infant school.  Having asked the children if they are tired, the teacher, if he receives an answer in the negative, may thus proceed:—­