lass.

"Yes sir."

"Well, I should like to have you say the line beginning nine times one."

The boy repeated it slowly, but correctly.

"Now I should like to have you try again, and I will, at the same time,
say another line, to see if I can put you out."

The boy looked surprised. The idea of his teacher's trying to perplex
and embarrass him, was entirely new.

"You must not be afraid," said the teacher; "you will undoubtedly not
succeed in getting through, but you will not be to blame for the
failure. I only try it, as a sort of intellectual experiment."

The boy accordingly began again, but was soon completely confused by the
teacher's accompaniment; he stopped in the middle of his line saying,

"I could say it, only you put me out."

"Well, now try to say the Alphabet, and let me see if I can put you out
there."

As might have been expected the teacher failed. The boy went regularly
onward to the end.

"You see now," said the teacher to the class which had witnessed the
experiment, "that this boy knows his Alphabet, in a different sense,
from that in which he knows his Multiplication table. In the latter, his
knowledge is only imperfectly his own; he can make use of it only under
favorable circumstances. In the former it is entirely his own;
circumstances have no control over him."

A child has a lesson in Latin Grammar to recite. She hesitates and
stammers, miscalls the cases, and then corrects herself, and if she gets
through at last, she considers herself as having recited well; and very
many teachers would consider it well too. If she hesitates a little
longer than usual, in trying to summon to her recollection a particular
word, she says, perhaps, "Don't tell me," and if she happens at last to
guess right, she takes her book with a countenance beaming with
satisfaction.

"Suppose you had the care of an infant school," might the instructer say
to such a scholar; "and were endeavoring to teach a little child to
count, and she should recite her lesson to you in this way; 'One, two,
four, no, three;--one, two, three,-- -- stop, don't tell me,--five--no
four--four--, five,-- -- -- I shall think in a minute,--six--is that
right? five, six, &c.' Should you call that reciting well?"

Nothing is more common than for pupils to say, when they fail of
reciting their lesson, that they could say it at their seats, but that
they cannot now say it, before the class. When such a thing is said for
the first ti