Conversation, as conversation, is hard to teach, we can only lead the way and lay down a few principles which keep it in the right path.  These commonplaces of warning, as old as civilization itself, belong to manners and to fundamental unselfishness, but obvious as they are they have to be said and to be repeated and enforced until they become matters of course.  Not to seem bored, not to interrupt, not to contradict, not to make personal remarks, not to talk of oneself (some one was naive enough to say “then what is there to talk of"), not to get heated and not to look cold, not to do all the talking and not to be silent, not to advance if the ground seems uncertain, and to be sensitively attentive to what jars—­all these and other things are troublesome to obtain, but exceedingly necessary.  And even observing them all we may be just as far from conversation as before; how often among English people, through shyness or otherwise, it simply faints from inanition.  We can at least teach that a first essential is to have something to say, and that the best preparation of mind is thought and reading and observation, to be interested in many things, and to give enough personal application to a few things as to have something worth saying about them.

By testing in writing every step of an educational course a great deal of command over all acquired materials may be secured.  As our girls grow older, essay-writing becomes the most powerful means for fashioning their minds and bringing out their individual characteristics.

It is customary now to begin with oral composition,—­quite rightly, for one difficulty at a time is enough.  But when children have to write for themselves the most natural beginning is by letters.  A great difference in thought and power is observable in their first attempts, but in the main the structure of their letters is similar, like the houses and the moonfaced persons which they draw in the same symbolic way.  Perhaps both are accepted conventions to which they conform—­handed down through generations of the nursery tradition—­though students of children are inclined to believe that these symbolical drawings represent their real mind in the representation of material things.  Their communications move in little bounds, a succession of happy thoughts, the kind of things which birds in conversation might impart to one another, turning their heads quickly from side to side and catching sight of many things unrelated amongst themselves.  It is a pity that this manner is often allowed to last too long, for in these stages of mental training it is better to be on the stretch to reach the full stature of one’s age rather than to linger behind it, and early promise in composition means a great deal.

To write of the things which belong to one’s age in a manner that is fully up to their worth or even a little beyond it, is better than to strain after something to say in a subject that is beyond the mental grasp.  The first thing to learn is how to write pleasantly about the most simple and ordinary things.  But a common fault in children’s writing is to wait for an event, “something to write about,” and to dispose of it in three or four sentences like telegrams.