was their sole dinner; varied, we were told, occasionally by boiled beans and peas. Sugar is allowed only on fête days. Meat is given three times a week. Some of the children had two or three helpings of rice, but many only one. Breakfast consists of bread and milk, or of grits boiled in milk. Supper of bread and water only. This undelightful and not very nutritious meal was eaten in solemn silence water, apparently not ad libitum, washed down the rice. accompanied the the dormitories.

After the dinner was over we master, who offered to show us We found them very clean and airy. The one we entered was furnished with thirty-five iron bedsteads and good arrangements for washing. The children go to bed every night at nine o'clock.

On descending into the hall, we found all the children assembled, and prepared to give us a song. They were in two divisions, and they soon burst out, singing most delightfully in parts Die Wacht am Rhein.' I have scarcely heard anything so sweetly harmonious. I noticed that half-a-dozen of the children ran up the stairs as if with some special object in view. That object was soon apparent. A fresh song was begun, in two parts as before, and

at the close of the stanza, echo, with delicious gentleness and sweetness, repeated the last few notes from the top of the house. The effect was truly charming. Poor children! they must have a hard life of it-rice without sugar for dinner, dry bread and limited water for supper, rough work in the fields, and (perhaps) rugged tillage in the school (but this I don't know); and with all this a good master, who, I hope, is gentle with them; but, in spite of everything else, they learn to sing delightfully, and there is some comfort at least in this. I have often since remembered their singing with pleasure, and contrasted the general effect with that produced by much of the singing in the Kindergartens, which, possibly from some defect in myself, possibly because my ear is especially sensitive to tune and harmony, was very often far from satisfactory to me. Time with the Kindergarten mistresses and their little pupils is generally a prime consideration, but I cannot say as much for tune, meaning by this the tasteful harmony of sweet sounds.

Singing is an important feature of Fröbel's system, and I do not think it is executed nearly as well as it might be by the little birds of the Kinder

gartens. Here, as is so generally the case in education, it is the teacher who is at fault; the materials are all there, but the teacher fails to make the best use of them. The germs of art, however feeble, are in the native constitution of every little child, and though not always able to struggle of themselves into the light, they can be nursed and developed into power-that is, some measure of power-by the teacher on the outside, if he is himself an artist in education. But all teachers are not artists in education; and this, again, not because they are naturally incapable, but because they are not naturally 'informed' and inspired with the pregnant conception that the teacher's function is generative and even creative, and they therefore believe themselves incapable without actually being so. They are unconscious of the powers they really possess, and they are unconscious of their own powers because they do not appreciate those of the children they teach; and lastly, they do not appreciate the children's powers, because they do not study carefully the nature of children. They should go to Fröbel, and learn from him what children are, and what they can do when artistically handled. It is a very important consideration that the product of education, after all,

depends mainly on the teacher.

The number of

stupid children is really very small, but the number of children who are left stupid—that is, of those whose powers are undeveloped—is very great; and this number is mainly dependent on the teacher, with whom it rests very much to decide whether these powers shall be ignored, developed, or stifled. The bad teacher is a menticide, who deserves punishment quite as much as the unskilful medical practitioner who is called into court to answer for his delinquencies. Hence it happens that young minds, that might have been quickened into life, remain dead, buried, and forgotten.

I visited in Hamburg some of the 'Bürger Kindergärten,' of which there are, I believe, nine in different parts of the town. In one of them I found several children, a division of whom were busily occupied in constructing various forms, and building with the little cubes of the fifth 'gift.' The fifth 'gift' presents a cube as divided into twenty-seven smaller cubes, and these are divided diagonally into fifty-four half cubes or prisms. Thus considered, it affords opportunity for forming (1) life-objects; (2) beauty-objects; (3) knowledgeobjects.

The children were engaged in dealing with forms of the first kind; that is, in building forms of life -real objects. They looked happy in their occupation, though it was carried on under very unfavourable circumstances. The room belongs to a Turnverein, which assembles in the evenings for gymnastic exercises. It was bare, rough, and gloomy, while the atmosphere was sensibly impregnated with the lingering fumes of the holocaust of tobacco which had been offered up on the preceding