pils should have textbooks without delay so that
no time may be wasted in getting started after the opening of school.
The walls should be adorned with a few appropriate and beautiful
pictures.

=Other Surroundings.=--On this school ground there should be a shop of
some kind. The resourceful teacher would find a hundred uses for some
such center of work. The closets should be so placed and so devised as
to be easily supervised. This would prevent them from being moral plague
spots, as is too often the case, as we have already said. There should
be stables for sheltering horses, if the school is, as it should be, a
social center for the community. There should be a flagpole in front of
the schoolhouse, from the top of which the stars and stripes should be
often unfurled to the breeze.

=Number of Pupils.=--In this architecturally attractive building, amid
beautiful surroundings both inside and out, there should be, in order to
have a good rural school, not less than eighteen or twenty pupils. Where
there are fewer the school should be consolidated with a neighboring
school. Twenty pupils would give an assurance of educational and social
life, instead of the dead monotony which often prevails in the smaller
rural school. There should be, during the year, at least eight, and
preferably nine, months of school work.

=It Will Not Teach Alone.=--But with all of these conditions the school
may still be far from effective. All the material equipment--the total
environment of the pupils, both inside and outside the building--may be
excellent, and still we may fail to find there a good school. Garfield
said of his old teacher that Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a
pupil on the other made the best kind of college. This indicates an
essential factor other than the physical equipment.

I remember being once in a store when a man who had bought a saw a few
days previously returned it in a wrathful mood. He was angry through and
through and declared that the saw was utterly worthless. He had brought
it back to reclaim his money. The merchant had a rich vein of humor in
his nature and he listened smilingly to the outburst of angry language.
Then he merely took the saw, opened his till and handed the man his
money, quietly asking, with a twinkle in his eyes for those standing
around, "Wouldn't it saw alone?"

Now, we may have a fine school ground, or site, with a variety of
beautiful trees and clumps of shrubbery; we may have