In the charming stories of that great master of English fiction, Charles Dickens, there are sketches of schools, scholars and teachers that every public educator might read with profit. I am confident we have no Yorkshire schools and schoolmasters in Kansas—schools in which every young affection, every kindly sympathy, every hopeful aspiration, was flogged and starved to death. I hope, too, that we have no schools like that in which poor little Paul Dombey was crammed to an untimely grave—schools in which the studies “went round like a mighty wheel, and the young gentlemen were stretched upon it.” But I fear that mechanical schoolmasters of the Bradley Headstone class, and schools like that of David Copperfield, with its unwholesome smells, its dirty floors and its ink-stained walls, are not wholly unknown in this country. Let us hope they are very few, and growing fewer as the years go on. Kansas people take just pride in saying that the best building in every town, village or neighborhood in the State is the school-house, and it is pleasant to believe that the young life within them all is as sweet, as happy and as healthful as the flowers, the birds, and the air of our prairies. In the “Old Curiosity Shop” there is a picture, homely but delightful, of a school whose influences would run like a golden thread through the life of every child brought within their scope. You remember it, I am sure—the picture of the simple-hearted, kindly old teacher, whose thoughts went wandering across the fields to the bedside of the scholar he loved; the patient, faithful old master whose rollicking boys were one and all the children of his heart and hopes; the shrewd and sympathetic old man who, when the forbidden shouts and laughter of his pupils on the playground jarred upon his mournful thoughts, said: “It’s natural, thank Heaven, and I’m very glad they didn’t mind me.” The way to the heart of a child is not difficult to find, and the teacher who is at once friend, confidant, sympathizer and instructor, has found it, and thus lightened not only his own burdens but those of his pupils. The true teacher, the successful educator, the really great master, is one who stimulates the ambition of his scholars, and, with ready tact and helpful sympathy, awakens and develops all that is best and brightest in their natures. It was his kindness and sympathy, no less than his great learning, that gave Arnold of Rugby his world-wide fame. It was his enthusiastic love for his work no less than his wisdom that gave Horace Mann his high rank as an educator.