ake as good a school, and accomplish as much for it, as you
can in six hours, and let the rest go. When you come from your school
room at night, leave all your perplexities and cares behind you. No
matter what unfinished business or unsettled difficulties remain.
Dismiss them all till another sun shall rise, and the hour of duty for
another day shall come. Carry no school work home with you and do not
talk of your work. You will then get refreshment and rest. Your mind
during the evening will be in a different world from that in which you
have moved during the day. At first this will be difficult. It will be
hard for you, unless your mind is uncommonly well disciplined, to
dismiss all your cares; and you will think, each evening, that some
peculiar emergency demands your attention, _just at that time_, and that
as soon as you have passed the crisis, you will confine yourself to what
you admit are generally reasonable limits. But if you once allow school
with its perplexities and cares to get possession of the rest of the
day, it will keep possession. It will intrude itself into all your
waking thoughts, and trouble you in your dreams. You will lose all
command of your powers, and besides cutting off from yourself all hope
of general intellectual progress, you will in fact destroy your success
as a teacher. Exhaustion, weariness, and anxiety will be your continual
portion, and in such a state, no business can be successfully
prosecuted.

There need be no fear that employers will be dissatisfied, if the
teacher acts upon this principle. If he is faithful and enters with all
his heart into the discharge of his duties during six hours, there will
be something in the ardor, and alacrity, and spirit with which his
duties will be performed, which parents and scholars will both be very
glad to receive, in exchange for the languid, and dull, and heartless
toil, in which the other method must sooner or later result.

* * * * *

If the teacher then, will confine himself to such a portion of time, as
is, in fact, all he can advantageously employ, there will be much left
which can be devoted to his own private employment,--more than is usual
in the other employments of life. In most of these other employments,
there is not the same necessity for limiting the hours which a man may
devote to his business. A merchant, for example, may be employed nearly
all the day, at his counting-room, and so may a me