souls engrossed in the new duties assigned them.  The teacher, too, feels a special interest in his experiment.  Whatever else he may be employed about, his eye turns instinctively to this group with an intensity of interest which an experienced teacher who has long been in the field, and who has tried experiments of this sort a hundred times, can scarcely conceive; for let it be remembered that I am describing the acts and feelings of a new beginner, of one who is commencing his work with a feeble and trembling step, and perhaps this is his first step away from the beaten path in which he has been accustomed to walk.

This new plan is continued, we will suppose, for a week, during which time the interest of the pupils continues.  They get longer lessons and make fewer mistakes than they did by the old method.  Now, in speculating on this subject, the teacher reasons very justly that it is of no consequence whether the pupil receives his knowledge through the eye or through the ear; whether they study in solitude or in company.  The point is to secure their progress in learning to spell the words of the English language, and as this point is secured far more rapidly and effectually by his new method, the inference is to his mind very obvious, that he has made a great improvement—­one of real and permanent value.  Perhaps he will consider it an extraordinary discovery.

But the truth is, that in almost all such cases as this, the secret of the success is not that the teacher has discovered a better method than the ordinary ones, but that he has discovered a new one.  The experiment will succeed in producing more successful results just as long as the novelty of it continues to excite unusual interest and attention in the class, or the thought that it is a plan of the teacher’s own invention leads him to take a peculiar interest in it.  And this may be a month, or perhaps a quarter; and precisely the same effects would have been produced if the whole had been reversed, that is, if the plan of dictation had been the old one, which in process of time had, in this supposed school, lost its interest, and the teacher, by his ingenuity and enterprise, had discovered and introduced what is now the common mode.

“Very well,” perhaps my reader will reply, “it is surely something gained to awaken and continue interest in a dull study for a quarter, or even a month.  The experiment is worth something as a pleasant and useful change, even if it is not permanently superior to the other.”

It is indeed worth something.  It is worth a great deal; and the teacher who can devise and execute such plans, understanding their real place and value, and adhering steadily through them all to the great object which ought to engage his attention, is in the almost certain road to success as an instructor.  What I wish is not to discourage such efforts; they ought to be encouraged to the utmost; but to have their real nature and design, and the real secret of their success fully understood, and to have the teacher, above all, take good care that all his new plans are made, not the substitutes for the great objects which he ought to keep steadily in view, but only the means by which he may carry them into more full and complete effect.