Southern family to which she belonged. In taking her walks she was imprest by the desolate condition of the mountain children. Their parents were too poor to supply them with anything more than the barest necessities of life, and they were growing up in utter indifference to everything pertaining to education. To remedy this to a small degree, she invited a number of them to meet her every Sunday at a little cabin she owned, and there undertook to teach them a few of the things they most needed to know. At the time Miss Berry had no thought of establishing a permanent school. Instead of being a temporary affair, however, the school soon made itself an institution, practically without any effort on her part. So far as the children of the "poor whites" were concerned, they not only crowded her cabin to more than its full capacity every Sunday, but they finally came to her with the request that a day-school be added. For a time it looked as if the movement had come to a point beyond which it could not go, but finally Miss Berry screwed up sufficient courage to make a trip to the North that she might tell some of the rich philanthropists about her "poor white" boys and her mountain school. It was an interesting story that she had to tell, and she told it so well that she went back to her pupils with funds sufficient not only to maintain the school, but to enlarge it. To-*day the school has one thousand acres of land, much of it under cultivation, and several fine buildings, in which fifteen teachers are kept busy instructing the one hundred and fifty pupils, not only in the studies of the ordinary school, but in the useful trades as well.—Human Life.
(2172)
NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE CULTURE
The lesson of the following poem, by T. Berry Smith, is that if we cultivate the good diligently the evil will thereby be weeded out:
Two fields lay side by side. Only a hedge
Which ran athwart the plain dissevered them.
In one my title lay, and he who owned
The other was my brother. Each alike
Had generous part of one ancestral lot,
And each alike due diligence displayed
On that he called his own. At early spring
Each with a shining share upturned the soil
And gave it to the sun, the wind, the shower.
Thenceforth we rested not. Busily we wrought
And wiped our briny brows 'neath burning suns,
Biding the time of one far-off event.
At summer's end we each one came at last
To find our recompense. Each had his own,
The end for which he'd toiled. Through all those days
My only thought had been no weeds should grow,
But he had plowed 'mid rows of waving corn
And in so doing killed the cumbering weeds
That grew between. And now at summer's close
Behold! my field was verdureless and bare,
While his was clad in vestiture of gold.
How vain my toil! His recompense how full,
Who reaped so much, yet plowed no more than I!
(2173)
NEGATIVE DISCIPLINE
A little boy went to school, and the teacher
asked, "What is your name?" He replied,
"Johnny Dont." He had never heard his
mother call him anything else and supposed
that was his real name. There are too many
parents who bring up their children on
"don'ts."
(2174)
NEGATIVE TEACHING
Professor Estabrook, the well-known educator,
once told this story to teachers for
the purpose of showing them the discouraging
results that attend the negative form of
command. A mother once sent her little
boy to buy some eggs. "Take this basket,"
she said, placing it in his small hand, "and
don't spill one or drop the basket. And don't
fall down." As he was passing through the
gate, she called after him, "Don't be gone
long and don't break the eggs." After the
little fellow had his order filled and started
home all he could think about was not breaking
or spilling the eggs. A vivid picture of
broken shells filled his mind. With a fearful
looking into the basket as if afraid they
would jump out of themselves, he did not
notice the large stone in his path and naturally
fell over it, spilling and breaking the
contents of the basket.
Our human tasks are done most
safely and effectively not while we are
concerned with the task, but while we
