491 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTUKE. 



JmfE 



Smith, putting out lier hand, " (Jive me ex- 

 actly lialf of them, Jiertha." 



Bertha handed tlie teacher two. 



" Why ! is tliat the way yon give anybody 

 half. Bertha? " 



Bertha, with open mouth, looked first at 

 one half and then at the other. 



" IIow many have you left, Hertha? " 



^' Three." 



'' How maiiv did you give me?" and the 

 teacher extended her hand with two sticks. 



''Two."' 



" Well," said the teacher, ''when you are 

 asked to give half, if you keep 8 and give 2, 

 you are cheating. If you give me half, we 

 should both have an equal number, and yet 

 you have 8 sticks and I have only 2."' 



Bertlia looked from one lot of sticks to the 

 other, and seemed greatly puzzled. Finally 

 she extended one of her remaining sticks to 

 the teacher. 



" Well, now," said the teacher, " I have 3 

 and you have only 2. That is not dividing, 

 either." The child finally recognized that 

 the trouble lay in the single odd stick, and 

 she held it in her hand hopelessly until the 

 teacher suggested that somebody might give 

 them five sticks of candy to be divided. 

 The sticks of candy opened the door to the 

 small intellect; and as the solution of the 

 problem made its way througli lier little 

 mind, you could see it in her face as she 

 looked up smilingly, sayiug, " Oh ! if it were 

 sticks of candy we would break one in two." 



" AVell. then, Bertha," said the teacher, 

 " what is the half of five? " 



" Two sticks and a half a stick ! " replied 

 Bertha, feeling happy because she had ar- 

 rived at the truth, without being told. 



By this time Marcia had finished her nests 

 and eggs on the blackboard. Said the teach- 

 er, "Well, Marcia, how many eggs are there 

 in the three nests? " 



Marcia could not quite grasp the sitnation 

 even then, until the teacher added, " Sup- 

 pose each egg should hatch out a little bird 

 — a bird from every egg, Marcia, how many 

 live birds would there be? " 



The suggestion of the little birds appealed 

 to the childish mind as before, and slie re- 

 plied, with a smile on her face, " Six." 



Dear reader. I wonder if there is any just 

 such patient, kind, gentle leading in j^our 

 home. Do you ever get weary iu well-doing 

 when you tell a child over and over some 

 simple thing? Do you ever feel like saying, 

 " I believe 1 have told that child a dozen 

 times to shut the door when she goes up- 

 stairs to bed, and there it is wide open now"? 



Line upon line, precept npon precept, is 

 what does the work. I enjoyed going to 

 school so well that I went'the next day, and 

 the next and the next. I not only smiled 

 myself to see these little intellects grasp 

 ideas, and take hold and grow and expand 

 and develop, but^I made the pupils smile, 

 and sometimes the teacher also. When I 

 said something about talking to the boys on 

 the matter of tobacco, the superintendent, 

 Mr. K., warmly seconded my plan ; and not 

 only that, hersuspended exercises, and gath- 

 ered the pupils into two large rooms, and 

 told me to talk just as long as I wanted to. 



I want to speak of the wonderful progress 



they are making in music in our school, and, 

 1 think very likely, in all the schools in our 

 land. As I came into one of the rooms. 

 Prof. Harding, of Oberlin, was instructing 

 the second-primary room. By taps of the 

 bell, the teacher brought all the little slates 

 on top of the desks, pencil in hand, in read- 

 iness for work. 



"Now, then," said the music -teacher, 

 " write down on your slates what I sing." 



He waited a little for them to make a 

 staff, and I began wondering whether those 

 urchins had skill enough to draw five 

 straight lines. At it they went, as if they 

 were parts of a machine. The boy nearest 

 me made snch surprisingly straight lines, 

 evenly spaced, off hand, without any ruler, 

 that 1 looked in surprise at the next one ; 

 but so it was all over the school. Then 

 Prof. Harding sang a measure of a hymn, 

 and every slate took down every note. 1 

 was asked to walk throngh the room and 

 look at the slates. They all had notes jnst 

 alike. Jiut I was still more astonished when 

 the teacher desired one pupil after another 

 to stand up and sing just what he sang. 

 Then he told them to write another. To 

 show me that they were not only taught 

 music but sound business principles, he 

 asked me to notice while he opened the 

 door and talked to somebody ontside ; then 

 he knocked down the pointer, which came 

 on the rioor with a clatter, and finally he 

 raised tlie window and called to somebody 

 outdoors. Scarcely a pupil looked up ; and 

 when he was read> , the music was all writ- 

 ten on each little slate. In another room, 

 more advanced, they liad on the board what 

 they called a " blackboard piano." Friend 

 Harding took a couple of pointers, one in 

 each hand. He then desired the boys of the 

 school to sing the notes he touched with the 

 pointer in his left hand. They were to 

 sound the note just as long as he held the 

 pointer on the key. The girls, in the same 

 way, sounded the notes touched by his right 

 hand. To my great astonishment the teach- 

 er played on those human juvenile voices 

 exactly as if they were the keys of an in- 

 strument, for each one sounded every note 

 exactly as he touched the blackboard ; and 

 the melody of those voices, especially the 

 small boys singing bass, was some of the 

 grandest music I have ever heard. 



Well, he played piece after piece on this 

 blackboard piano ; but pretty soon he struck 

 on something that ran up higher than the 

 scale-board, so his music liad to stop right in 

 the middle, while he laid down a pointer, 

 grasped a piece of chalk, and made the in- 

 strument large enough to compass the piece. 

 When his marking was finished he took the 

 pointers again and proceeded, and his class 

 finished up the piece just as if there had 

 been no interruption. Another exercise 

 was to point out any one of the forty or fifty 

 pupils, and bid him" stand up and start some 

 familiar song, directing the others to fall iu 

 and support him as soon as he started. 

 When the whole school was well under way, 

 by a motion of his' hand they all stopped, 

 aiid another pupil started some other piece. 

 This they did in rapid succession for ten or 

 a dozen "songs, and each piece was a differ- 



