"Property in Britain comes before everything. I may steal the life and soul from a woman if I employ her at a penny an hour, and I may get a title for doing so. But if I steal Mr. Thomson's turnips I merely get ten days' hard." "You bairns should draw up a Declaration of Rights," I added, and I think that a few understood my meaning. * * * I find that my bairns have a genuine love for poetry. To-day I read them Tennyson's _Lady of Shalott_; then I read them _The May Queen_. I asked them which was the better, and most of them preferred, _The Lady of Shalott_. I asked for reasons, and Margaret Steel said that the one was strange and mysterious, while the other told of an ordinary death-bed. The whole class seemed to be delighted when I called _The May Queen_ a silly mawkish piece of sentimentality. I have made them learn many pieces from Stevenson's _A Child's Garden of Verses_, and they love the rhythm of such pieces as _The Shadow March_. Another poem that they love is _Helen of Kirkconnell_; I asked which stanza was the best, and they all agreed on this beautifully simple one:-- O Helen fair, beyond compare, I'll mak a garland o' thy hair; Shall bind my heart for evermair, Until the day I dee, I believe in reading out a long poem and then asking them to memorise a few verses. I did this with _The Ancient Mariner_. Long poems are an abomination to children; to ask them to commit to memory a piece like Gray's _Elegy_ is unkind. I have given them the first verse of Francis Thompson's _The Hound of Heaven_. I did not expect them to understand a word of it; my idea was to test their power of appreciating sound. Great music might convey something to rustics, but great poetry cannot convey much. Still, I try to lead them to the greater poetry. I wrote on the board a verse of _Little Jim_ and a verse of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, and I think I managed to give them an inkling of what is good and what is bad verse. I begin to think that country children should learn ballads. There is a beauty about the old ballads that even children can catch; it is the beauty of a sweet simplicity. When I think of the orchestration of Swinburne, I think of the music of the ballads as of a flute playing. And I know that orchestration would be lost on country folk. I hate the poems that crowd the average school-book ... _Little Jim_, _We are Seven_, _Lucy Gray_, _The Wreck of the Hesperus_, _The Boy stood on the Burning Deck_, and all the rest of them. I want to select the best of the Cavalier lyrists' works, the songs from the old collections like Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_ and England's _Helicon_, the lyrics from the Elizabethan dramatists. I want to look through moderns like William Watson, Robert Bridges, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Henley, Dowson, Abercrombie, William Wilfred Gibson ... there must be many charming pieces that bairns would enjoy.