inside this "shining ball" we have not fully discovered. We take him to the master. We make our bargain for his education. We agree to pay three or four dollars a year, or if it is a teacher who can "command his price," we go as high as a dollar a month. Like the majority of his class, the teacher to whom little Ayuke is consigned, is a scholastic past the prime of life, who has been "plucked" at the provincial examinations, and having failed of his degree and of the official appointment he aspired to, has subsided into a pedagogue. The disappointment has not improved his temper, but neither does it invalidate his qualifications to teach. He knows the four classics by heart, and has voice enough and muscle enough to beat them into the memories of his pupils. The school-room is a rude place, generally a loft over a shop, sometimes a bamboo shed cheaply thrown together for the purpose, rarely a decent room with comfortable appoint

ments.

Quae cum ita sint, we commit little Ayuke to the course of nature and the master's bamboo. Being (according to the supposition) Chinese parents with a dash of Western ideas, we are supposed to retain a friendly interest in the boy's progress, after he is fairly launched in the ancient curriculum. Accordingly, we visit the school sometimes to see how he is getting on; which "we," however, does not include the better half of us, for being a woman, she, of course, never went to school and could not tell the first letter of the trimetrical from little Ayuke's last sketch of our Shanghai rooster. It is only WE, the husband and father, that has been educated, and, therefore, it is only WE, pluralis majestatis, that can look after our son and heir, while he is going through the mill.

The first day's lesson is the first three or four lines of the aforesaid Trimetrical classic. The master calls the class before him and begins with the musical quatrain,

Jin chi tsu,

sing pun shen; Sing siang kin,

sih siang yuen:

* Men at their birth, are by nature radically good; In this all approximate, but in practice widely diverge.

whereupon the whole class chant it in concert after him. This is repeated and re-repeated, until every boy has the right sound of each character, when they are dismissed to their seats to study it by themselves: which they do aloud.

Let it be understood that this

Then another set of boys go through the same process with the Hundred Family Name, or the Thousand Character Classic, or whatever other text-book may have been reached in the course. And when a boy has his lesson by heart, he is summoned to the teacher's desk, gives up his book, turns round back to him, and recites the whole, word for word. And so little Ayuke has got to back through his whole education. process is only the memorizing of the letters, getting the sound and form into the memory, by sheer dogged force of repetition and bamboo. It has nothing to do with the meaning of these characters. That is another process. The pupil is not expected to attach any sense to Fin chi tsu, sing pun shen. He is simply to daguerrotype the form of each character upon the eye, and din its sound into his ear, until it can never be lost; a process much like teaching an American child the sound cow, without informing him whether it means cow, or hippopotamus, or the temple of Jupiter.

Little Ayuke goes to school early, so his mother and I have to be up betimes. To be sure, we Chinese put together easily, and it takes little time; for though we are a very cleanly people, our toilet is simple, and is not encumbered with such preternatural enrobings and adornments as the Western fankwei submit to, poor slaves! However, we are up with the lark, in fact, half a day before, if the lark lives in England; and our little shaver (we cannot comprehend why Western barbarians should call their offspring little shavers, when they do not shave at all, themselves or anybody else) gets to school at sunrise. There he studies, or something, till ten o'clock, and then home to breakfast, where his mother has ready for him a bowl or two of rice, with a few boiled shrimps or the like of that; and the little glutton has a keen appetite for them too. Then in the course of an hour or so he is back at his lessons, and keeps it up till five P. M., when the master lets him off for the day. We do not in our country waste time in vacations, and have no more holidays than are absolutely

necessary to keep on the weather side of the gods, some ten or a dozen. So little Ayuke is in for the year; and, when that is up, I shall make a new bargain with the master as soon as convenient, and he will begin again.

This course will go on for some three years, more or less. By that time he will have gone through the required text-books, and committed to memory some two or three thousand characters. Then he will go back, and begin at jin chi tsu again, and go over the same course, to learn the meanings of the characters he has committed. This will take him two or three years more. this will complete his Primary-school education.

And

But you must understand that our Ayuke is no common drudge, and we mean to make him one of the literati. Who can tell but that his genius may yet surpass the fame of Lin, who outmanouvred the English diplomatists thirty years ago; nay, why may he not come up to the labors and glories of the divine Shun, or of Yu the Great, who four thousand years ago drained the floods of the empire, and reduced the chaos to order?

And here is what he will have to do. We shall put him through all the best schools of the province, and, if necessary, have him coached for years by a private tutor, until he is pronounced ready for examination. Once a year the government examination is held in the shire town of the district, and some two thousand candidates present themselves for trial. In due time our Ayuke will be among them. He will be shut up by himself in a solitary cell for a day and night, and will compose a poem and one or two essays on topics assigned by the chancellor. When the two thousand packets are examined, some twenty will be accepted and their authors passed. If he is one, he will receive the title of siu-ts ài, or budding genius, and we shall give a great feast in honor of so glorious a distinction conferred on our house. Then, after a further course of hard study, he will present himself as a competitor for the second degree at the triennial examination. Once in three years all the budding geniuses come up from each district to the capital city of the province, and are examined by special envoys sent down from Pekin. There will be some ten thousand of them, and only a hundred will be promoted They will be examined three times, three days each time. It

Ayuke passes this terrible ordeal, he will be a chü-jin, or promoted scholar, and will be entitled to wear a gilded button on his cap and put up flag-staffs before his door. Tens of thousands of learned Chinamen never get beyond this; but Ayuke will not stop here. He is not fully a mandarin yet. In due time he will go up to Pekin with all the other promoted scholars from all the provinces, to try for the third degree. If he wins, he will be one of the two or three hundred picked men of all the learned and wise of the whole empire, and will wear the honorable title of tsin-shi, ready for office. That will make him a mandarin. He may have an office at once if he wishes. But more likely he will just try for the coveted distinction of membership in the Imperial Academy. He will gain it by proving himself to be one of the first twenty out of the whole two or three hundred. This will make him a literary grandee indeed, and will put him in the highest rank, among the few choice first scholars of the empire. For this he will be examined by the Emperor himself, in the palace. There is but one higher distinction in the Central Flowery Kingdom to which any mortal can aspire. Once in three years, out of this highest selected circle, the emperor chooses one man, as the finest of all, the laureate, the chuang-yuen or model scholar of the empire, who by that last examination attains the highest possible summit of earthly felicity. No western dukedom or princedom, which comes by the paltry accident of birth and blood, can for a moment compare with this sublime elevation to which one climbs by the patient toil and study of a life-time, and for which he must outstrip one by one no less than two millions of competitors who started with him in the race.

This is what we dream for our little Ayuke. This is what he will begin to dream for himself before he is out of his teens. To be sure, he is hardly yet on the bottom round of the infinite ladder, and is still belaboring his glossy little pate with the first lesson, jin chi tsu, sing pun shen, but he has at least threescore years of climb in him; and by dint of midnight study and hard bambooing, he shall land on the topmost round, a ruby-buttoned mandarin of the first chop, or die in the attempt.

JOHN S. SEWALL.

Bowdoin College, Feb. 13, 1873.

TEACHING A FINE ART.

THERE are many ways of looking upon one's work in life, whether that work be teaching, or anything else. To some it is mere drudgery for daily bread, to be got through with as quickly as possible, giving the least amount of life and thought to it that will pass with one's employers, and secure the desired pecuniary reward; or, as Caleb Garth so well says in Middlemarch, "always looking over the edge of your work to the play beyond." Such persons have no pleasure in their work, and even recreation is soured by the thought of the daily drudgery to which they are bound. They may keep the mechanical routine of work going on, but they never add any new value to it, and they never get either refreshment or culture out of it. There are unfortunately many teachers of this class.

To a higher grade, work is a trade valuable for the result it brings, not only in pecuniary profit to the workman, but in the production of good results to others. The honest workman of this stamp takes a pride in his work, is anxious that it should be faithfully done, and considers his character and reputation involved in it. The teacher of this character follows out methods carefully, is conscientious in the fulfilment of her duties, does not slight the slow or backward scholars in her classes, and secures the required results by bringing her pupils through a given amount of labor in a certain time. She has a satisfaction in her work, and finds tangible evidence of fidelity in the steady progress of her school. She is content, however, to follow in the beaten paths, and to do as well this year as she did last, content if her pupils fulfil the required round of studies, and order is well kept in her school-room. There are many such teachers doing honest and good work, and helping to carry on the great cause of education by thus holding on to the drill and methods. which have been established as of general advantage.

But there are others who are not content without a higher intellectual aim in their work, to whom it is a profession, to which talent and thought must be clearly given. Such workers count as precious every opportunity for higher training, every new opening for light on their work or activity in it. Results are not