When will some original publisher give us a decent school Reader? I have not seen one that is worth using. Some of them give excerpts from Dickens and Fielding and Borrow (that horrid bore) and Hawthorne (another). I cannot find any interest in these excerpts; they have no beginning and no end. Moreover, a bairn does like the dramatic; prosiness deadens its wee soul at once. I want to see a Reader especially written for bairns. I want to see many complete stories, filled with bright dialogue. Every yarn should commence with dialogue. I always think kindly of the late Guy Boothby, because he usually began with, "Hands up, or I fire!" or a kindred sentence. I wish I could lay hands on a Century Reader I used as a boy. It was full of the dramatic. The first story was one about the Burning of Moscow, then came the tale of Captain Dodds and the pirate (from Reade's novel, _Hard Cash_, I admit. An excerpt need not be uninteresting), then a long passage from _The Deerslayer_ ... with a picture of Indians throwing tomahawks at the hero. I loved that book. I think that dramatic reading should precede prosy reading. It is life that a child wants, not prosy descriptions of sunsets and travels; life, and romance. I have scrapped my Readers; I don't use them even for Spelling. I do not teach Spelling; the teaching of it does not fit into my scheme of education. Teaching depends on logic. Now Spelling throws logic to the winds. I tell a child that "cough" is "coff," and logic leads him to suppose that rough is "roff" and "through" is "throff." If I tell him that spelling is important because it shows whence a word is derived, I am bound in honesty to tell him that a matinee is not a "morning performance," that manufactured goods are not "made by hand." Hence I leave Spelling alone. At school I "learned" Spelling, and I could not spell a word until I commenced to read much. Spelling is of the eye mainly. Every boy can spell "truly" and "obliged" when he leaves school, but ten years later he will probably write "truely" and "oblidged." Why? I think that the explanation lies in the fact that he does not read as a growing youth. Anyway, dictionaries are cheap. * * * To-night I sat down on a desk and lit my pipe. Margaret Steel and Lizzie Buchan were tidying up the room. Margaret looked at me thoughtfully for a second. "Please, sir, why do you smoke?" she said. "I really don't know, Margaret," I said. "Bad habit, I suppose ... just like writing notes to boys." She suddenly became feverishly anxious to pick up the stray papers. "I wonder," I mused, "whether they do it in the same old way. How do they do it, Margaret?" She dived after a piece of paper. "I used to write them myself," I said. Margaret looked up quickly. "You!" she gasped. "I am not so old," I said hastily. "Please, sir, I didn't mean that," she explained in confusion. "You did, you wee bissom," I chuckled.