stove. But it had windows on three sides, and was set down in
the midst of a grassy meadow bordered with a stone wall.

There were fourteen pupils. They were all assembled in the school-yard
when we arrived. The boys were playing baseball, and the girls, perched
on the stone wall, were watching them. The moment they saw the teacher
boys and girls alike came to escort her to her place in the school-
house. When she was in it, they took their own places--those they had
occupied during the former term. There was one "new" pupil, a small boy.
He had been so frequently a "visiting scholar" the previous year that
his newness was not very patent. There was a desk that he also claimed
as his.

"We will sing 'America,'" were the words with which the teacher
commenced the new school year, "and then we will go on with our work,
beginning where we left off in the spring."

We hear a great deal at the present time concerning the education of the
"particular child." In the very best of our private schools in the city
each pupil is regarded as a separate and distinct individual, and taught
as such. This ideal condition of things prevailed in that little
district school in the farming region of New Hampshire. That teacher had
fourteen pupils; practically, she had fourteen "grades." Even when it
happened that two children were taught the same lesson, each one was
taught it individually.

"They are all so different!" the teacher said, when I commented upon the
difference of her methods with the various children. "That boy, who
hopes to go to college and then teach, needs to get one thing from his
history lesson; and that girl, who intends to be a post-office clerk as
soon as she finishes school, needs to get something else."

She did not aim to prepare her pupils for college. The district school
was only a "grammar school." There was a high school in the nearest
village, which was three miles away; she made her pupils ready for
entrance into that. In order to attend the high school, more than one
child in that neighborhood, year after year, in sunshine and storm,
walked two and three miles twice daily. Many a child who lived still
farther away was provided by an interested father with a horse and a
conveyance with which to make the two journeys a day. No wonder the
teacher of that district school felt that the people in the neighborhood
were "thoroughly awake to the importance of education"!

As for the children--she had said that