lasses
a day--twenty-five to fifty students each--but so much falls upon stony
ground, among tares, so much is snapped up by the birds----"

"When a child asks a question, he is prepared to receive," I repeated.
"If the answer is true and well-designed, it will stay. The question
itself proves that the soil is somehow ready----"

"Yes," she said, "but one cannot sit at a desk and wait for questions.
The teacher in dealing with numbers must not only plant the seed, but
prepare the soil, too."

"I should say that the way to do that would be to quicken the
imagination--to challenge the imagination," I suggested. "I know it has
to be done in writing a story. One has to pick up the reader and carry
him away at first. And most readers are limp or logy in the midst of
abundance."

The teacher bowed gravely. Apparently she had come to listen.

"... Now, with this little girl here, there is but one subject that
surely interests her. That has to do with the old Mother of us all----"

"Nature?"

"Yes. I've tried to find out something of what Nature means to her--what
pictures _mean_ Nature to that fresh young mind. It seems to her, Nature
is a kind of presiding mother to all things, possibly something like a
God-mother--to kittens and trees and butterflies and roses and children.
She is mistress of the winds and the harvests.... I have talked with her
about it. Sometimes again, Nature is like a wonderful cabinet--shelf
after shelf full of amazing things, finished or to be finished. I told
her about the Sun as the Father, and Nature the Mother. That helped her.
She held to that. Always now when we fall into talk _naturally_--it is
about the old Mother and the brilliant Father who pours his strength
upon all concerned--Mother Nature's mate."

The teacher nodded indulgently. "That's preparing the soil. That's
quickening the imagination. But one must have imagination to do
that----"

We fell silent. I was thinking of the old school days--of the handful of
days in the midst of thousands that had left a gleam; of the tens of
thousands of young women now teaching in America without the gleam;
beginning to teach at the most distracted period of their lives, when
all Nature is drawing them toward mating and reproduction....

"Yes, a teacher should have imagination," I added. "There's no way out
of that, really. A teacher who hasn't--kills it in the child; at least,
all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon t