Omaincniing Our School Yards. 439 



an appreciation of the things that are under their eyes and familiar to 

 them in their daily walks. 



I believe it is a misfortune that these things are too common. It is 

 a misfortune that they see them, and the only fact that they seem to learn 

 when they see a vine is that it does not poison them when it has five 

 leaves, but it does poison them when it has three. They look at it from 

 that standpoint. They look at these things from a utilitarian standpoint. 



I stand before you to-night utterly discouraged as to finding out any 

 method whatever of impressing upon these people with their environ- 

 ment, the beauty of the things around them. 



I stand here self-confessed that whilst I was in the midst of these 

 things they did not impress me. In some way I had another standpoint 

 from which I viewed them, from that which I viewed them under other 

 conditions. 



To appreciate them properly I had to be deprived of them and I 

 had to get a sort of scientific interest in them. Therefore, I would say 

 that it ought to be ground into them for years and impressed upon their 

 minds while they are in an impressionable condition. I am not a teacher. 

 I have a few pupils in the country, though I have never taught a day in 

 my life. In the country when one of the boys follows me around I 

 stoop sometimes and call his attention to something that he has cut off 

 or pulled up or mowed down. I find in a great many of the details that 

 he knows more about it than I do, but I find many little things to talk 

 to him about that he has never thought of. I claim that some of these 

 things might be taught in our public schools. I may say that a boy 

 ought to be taught in the public schools how to make a good graft and 

 how to arrange any kind of shrubbery, and I think it will do him more 

 iiood, for instance, than to know the ramifications of the Connecticut 

 river. (Laughter.) 



Do you know away back east when they did not know that there 

 were any other rivers out west, tliey had on their niap^ in the geogra- 

 phies the elaborate ramifications of the Connecticut river. (Renewed 

 laughter.) I know as a boy that I got terrildy tangled up over that 

 river, but I found out after awhile that there were two or three other 

 rivers in this country besides that one. (More laughter). 



