with every question of your lessons.  Sometimes you will be unavoidably prevented from studying them, and at other times, when you have studied them very carefully, you may have forgotten, or you may fail from some misapprehension of the meaning in some cases.  Do not, in such a case, feel troubled because you may not have appeared as well as some individual who has not been half as faithful as yourself.  If you have done your duty, that is enough.  On the other hand, you ought to feel no better satisfied with yourselves when your lesson has not been studied well, because you may have happened to know the parts which came to you.  Have I done well? should always be the question, not, Have I managed to appear well?

“I will say a word here,” continued the teacher, “upon a practice which I have known to be very common in some schools, and which I have been sorry to notice occasionally in this.  I mean that of prompting, or helping each other along in some way at recitations.  Now where a severe punishment is the consequence of a failure, there might seem to be some reasonableness in helping your companions out of difficulty, though even then such tricks are departures from honorable dealing.  But, especially where there is no purpose to be served but that of appearing to know more than you do, it certainly must be considered a very mean kind of artifice.  I think I have sometimes observed an individual to be prompted where evidently the assistance was not desired, and even where it was not needed.  To whisper to an individual the answer to a question is sometimes to pay her rather a poor compliment at least, for it is the same as saying ’I am a better scholar than you are; let me help you along a little.’

“Let us then, hereafter, have only fair, open, honest dealings with each other; no attempts to appear to advantage by little artful manoeuvring; no prompting; no peeping into books.  Be faithful and conscientious, and then banish anxiety for your success.  Do you not think you will find this the best course?” “Yes, sir,” answered every scholar.  “Are you willing to pledge yourselves to adopt it?” “Yes, sir.”  “Those who are may raise their hands,” said the teacher.  Every hand was raised; and the pledge, there was evidence to believe, was honorably sustained.

16.  KEEPING RESOLUTIONS.—­The following are notes of a familiar lecture on this subject, given by a teacher at some general exercise in the school.  The practice of thus reducing to writing what the teacher may say on such subjects will be attended with excellent effects.

This is a subject upon which young persons find much difficulty.  The question is asked a thousand times, “How shall I ever learn to keep my resolutions?” Perhaps the great cause of your failures is this.  You are not sufficiently definite in forming your purposes.  You will resolve to do a thing without knowing with certainty whether it is even possible to do it.  Again, you make resolutions which are