“It seems, young gentlemen, to be generally the custom in colleges for the students to ornament the walls and benches of their recitation-rooms with various inscriptions and caricatures, so that after the premises have been for a short time in the possession of a class, every thing within reach, which will take an impression from a penknife or a trace from a pencil, is covered with names, and dates, and heads, and inscriptions of every kind.  The faculty do not know what you wish in this respect in regard to the new accommodations which the trustees have now provided for you, and which you are soon to enter.  They have had them fitted up for you handsomely, and if you wish to have them kept in good order, we will assist you.  If the students think proper to express by a vote, or in any other way, their wish to keep them in good order, we will engage to have such incidental injuries as may from time to time occur immediately repaired.  Such injuries will, of course, be done; for, whatever may be the wish and general opinion of the whole, it is not to be expected that every individual in so large a community will be careful.  If, however, as a body, you wish to have the building preserved in its present state, and will, as a body, take the necessary precautions, we will do our part.”

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The students responded to this appeal most heartily.  They passed a vote expressing a desire to preserve the premises in order, and for many years, and, for aught I know, to the present hour, the whole is kept as a room occupied by gentlemen should be kept.  At some other colleges, and those, too, sustaining the very highest rank among the institutions of the country, the doors of the public buildings are sometimes studded with nails as thick as they can possibly be driven, and then covered with a thick coat of sand dried into the paint, as a protection from the knives of the students!!

The particular methods by which the teacher is to interest his pupils in his various plans for their improvement can not be fully described here.  In fact, it does not depend so much on the methods he adopts as upon the view which he himself takes of these plans, and the tone and manner in which he speaks of them to his pupils.

A teacher, for example, perhaps on the first day of his labors in a new school, calls a class to read.  They pretend to form a line, but it crooks in every direction.  One boy is leaning back against a desk; another comes forward as far as possible, to get near the fire; the rest lounge in every position and in every attitude.  John is holding up his book high before his face to conceal an apple from which he is endeavoring to secure an enormous bite.  James is, by the same sagacious device, concealing a whisper which he is addressing to his next neighbor, and Moses is seeking amusement by crowding and elbowing the little boy who is unluckily standing next him.