But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and keep them out of the details.  When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.  Who are the scholars who get ‘rattled’ in the recitation-room?  Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act.  Who are those who do recite well?  Often those who are most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their memory of their own accord.  Why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world?  To what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one’s interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion?  How can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this?  On the other hand, conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance.  To some extent this is useful.  But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a general doctrine should be preached.  We are only too careful as it is.  The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher.  Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap:  then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat similar.  Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one’s carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running of one’s mind.  Take, for example, periods when there are many successive days of examination impending.  One ounce of good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance.  If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, “I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t care an iota whether I succeed or not.”  Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently.  I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss