forgotten how to bound Connecticut, and how to solve
the equation of the field and thicket; but up out of the far-off years
come all the blessed lessons in virtue and righteousness which those
reading books taught; and when we now remember, how even these moral
memories have faded I cannot but wish the teachers had made us bound the
States less, and solve fewer puzzles in 'position' and the 'cube root'
and made us commit to memory the whole series of the McGuffey Eclectic
Headers. The memory that comes from these far-away pages is full of the
best wisdom of time or the timeless land. In these books we were indeed
led by a schoolmaster, from beautiful maxims for children up to the
best thoughts of a long line of sages, and poets, and naturalists. There
we all first learned the awful weakness of the duel that took away a
Hamilton; there we saw the grandeur of the Blind Preacher of William
Wirt; there we saw the emptiness of the ambition of Alexander, and there
we heard even the infidel say, 'Socrates died like a philosopher, but
Jesus Christ like a God.'"

This public recognition of the influence of these readers upon the mind
and character of this great preacher is again noted in Rev. Joseph Fort
Newton's biography of David Swing in which the books which influenced
that life are named as "The Bible, Calvin's Institutes, Fox's Book of
Martyrs and the McGuffey Readers;" and the author quotes David Swing as
saying that "The Institutes were rather large reading for a boy, but to
the end of his life he held that McGuffey's Sixth Reader was a great
book. For Swing, as for many a boy in the older West, its varied and
wise selections from the best English authors were the very gates of
literature ajar."

One of the most eminent political leaders of the present day attributes
his power in the use of English largely to the study of McGuffey's Sixth
Reader in the common schools of Ohio.

[How a Japanese Learned English]

At a dinner lately given in New York to Marquis Ito of Japan, the
marquis responded to the toast of his health returning thanks in
English. He then continued his remarks in Japanese for some eight
minutes. At its close Mr. Tsudjuki, who was then the minister of
Education in Japan, traveling with Marquis Ito as his friend and
companion, and who had taken shorthand notes of the Japanese speech,
rose and translated the speech readily and fluently into good English.
One of the guests asked how he had learned to sp