tent to get their education before the rush.  In times past, when these vocational folks have piped unto me I have not danced; but I now see the error of my ways and shall proceed at once to take dancing lessons.  When these folks lead in the millennium I want to be sitting well up in front; and when they get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow I want to participate in the distribution.  I do hope, though, that I may not exhaust my resources on the band and have none left for the boys and girls.  I hope I may not imitate Mark Twain’s steamboat that stopped dead still when the whistle blew, because blowing the whistle required all the steam.

I suspect that, like the Irishman, I shall have to wear my new boots awhile before I can get them on, for this new role is certain to entail many changes in my plans and in my ways of doing things.  I can see that it will be a wrench for me to think of the boys and girls as pedagogical specimens and not persons.  I have contracted the habit of thinking of them as persons, and it will not be easy to come to thinking of them as mere objects to practise on.  The folks in the hospital speak of their patients as “cases,” but I’d rather keep aloof from the hospital plan in my schoolmastering.  But, being a member of the band, I suppose that I’ll feel it my duty to conform and do my utmost to help prove that our cult has discovered the great and universal panacea, the balm in Gilead.

As a member of the band, in good and regular standing, I shall find myself saying that the school should have the boys and girls pursue such studies as will fit them for their life-work.  This has a pleasing sound.  Now, if I can only find out, somehow, what the life-work of each one of my pupils is to be, I’ll be all right, and shall proceed to fit each one out with his belongings.  I have asked them to tell me what their life-work is to be, but they tell me they do not know.  So I suspect that I must visit all their parents in order to get this information.  Until I get this information I cannot begin on my course of study.  If their parents cannot tell me I hardly know what I shall do, unless I have recourse to their maiden aunts.  They ought to know.  But if they decline to tell I must begin on a long series of guesses, unless, in the meantime, I am endowed with omniscience.

This whole plan fascinates me; I dote upon it.  It is so pliable, so dreamy, and so opalescent that I can scarce restrain my enthusiasm.  But if I should fit one of my boys out with the equipment necessary for a blacksmith, and then he should become a preacher, I’d find the situation embarrassing.  My reputation as a prophet would certainly decline.  If I could know that this boy is looking forward to the ministry as his life-work, the matter would be simple.  I’d proceed to fit him out with a fire-proof suit of Greek, Hebrew, and theology and have the thing done.  But even then some of my colleagues might protest on the assumption that Greek