em myself, to save time and failure;
but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the children.

Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and peg them
alongside the English ones, so that we could always have contemporaneous
French history under our eyes as we went our English rounds. We pegged
them down to the Hundred Years' War, then threw the idea aside, I do not
now remember why. After that we made the English pegs fence in European
and American history as well as English, and that answered very well.
English and alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,
cataclysms, revolutions--we shoveled them all into the English fences
according to their dates. Do you understand? We gave Washington's birth
to George II.'s pegs and his death to George III.'s; George II. got
the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the Declaration of Independence.
Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French
Revolution, the Edict of Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey,
Patay, Cowpens, Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the
logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--anything
and everything all over the world--we dumped it all in among the English
pegs according to it date and regardless of its nationality.

If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have lodged the
kings in the children's heads by means of pictures--that is, I should
have tried. It might have failed, for the pictures could only be
effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the master, for it is the work
put upon the drawing that makes the drawing stay in the memory, and my
children were too little to make drawings at that time. And, besides,
they had no talent for art, which is strange, for in other ways they are
like me.

But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will be able
to use it. It will come good for indoors when the weather is bad and one
cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us imagine that the kings are a
procession, and that they have come out of the Ark and down Ararat for
exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road. This will
bring several of them into view at once, and each zigzag will represent
the length of a king's reign.

And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project you will use
the parlor wall. You do not mark on the wall; that would cause trouble.
You only attach bits of paper to it with pins or thumb-tac