assigned, and listen to the one who is appointed
to read the words to them, with every faculty aroused, and their whole
souls engrossed in the new duties assigned them. The teacher, too,
feels a special interest in his experiment. Whatever else be may be
employed about, his eye turns instinctively to this group, with an
intensity of interest, which an experienced teacher who has long been in
the field, and who has tried experiments of this sort a hundred times,
can scarcely conceive. For let it be remembered that I am describing the
acts and feelings of a new beginner; of one who is commencing his work,
with a feeble and trembling step, and perhaps this is his first step
from the beaten path in which he has been accustomed to walk.

This new plan is continued, we will suppose, a week, during which time
the interest of the pupils continues. They get longer lessons, and make
fewer mistakes than they did by the old method. Now in speculating on
this subject, the teacher reasons very justly, that it is of no
consequence whether the pupil receives his knowledge through the eye, or
through the ear; whether they study in solitude or in company. The point
is to secure their progress in learning to spell the words of the
English language, and as this point is secured far more rapidly and
effectually by his new method, the inference is to his mind very
obvious, that he has made a great improvement,--one of real and
permanent value. Perhaps he will consider it an extraordinary discovery.

But the truth is, that in almost all such cases as this, the secret of
the success is, not that the teacher has discovered a _better_ method
than the ordinary ones, but that he has discovered a _new_ one. The
experiment will succeed in producing more successful results, just as
long as the novelty of it continues to excite unusual interest and
attention in the class, or the thought that it is a plan of the
teacher's own invention, leads him to take a peculiar interest in it.
And this may be a month, or perhaps a quarter, and precisely the same
effects would have been produced, if the whole had been reversed, that
is, if the plan of dictation had been the old one, which in process of
time had, in this supposed school, lost its interest, and the teacher by
his ingenuity and enterprise had discovered and introduced what is now
the common mode.

"Very well," perhaps my reader will reply, "it is surely something
gained to awaken and continue interes