ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. _New York, July 1, 1899._ THE INFLUENCE OF PICTURES. J. P. M'CASKEY. If it is a very good thing to hang attractive pictures on the walls of the home, then it is doubly so thus to ornament the walls of the schoolroom. "In the emptiest room," says Ruskin, "the mind wanders most, for it gets restless like a bird for want of a perch, and casts about for any possible means of getting out and away. Bare walls are not a proper part of the means of education; blank plaster about and above them is not suggestive to pupils." The landscape makes a bright opening through the dead wall like a window; flowers and ferns are suggestive of the garden, the lane, the field, the woods, the purling stream; of song-birds in the air or among the branches, and blue sky overhead. Animals suggest a life with which we should be more or less familiar. The portrait speaks the man, what we know of him, suggesting trains of thought that may be most interesting and profitable. A mother wondered why her three brave lads had all gone to sea from an inland home. She was speaking, in her loneliness, with a friend who had called upon her, and she could not suggest any reason why they should all have adopted the sea-faring life when none of their friends or relatives had been sailors. The man observed a picture of a full-rigged ship hanging above the mantel. It was perhaps the only picture in the room, at least the only one at all conspicuous. A thought struck him. "How long has that picture been hanging there?" he asked. "Oh, it has been there ever since the boys were little children." "It was that," he said, "that sent your boys away. The sea grew upon their imagination until they longed for it, and sought it, and so they are gone." So a striking or attractive picture, in the schoolroom as in the home, may sink deep into the heart of the child, and mean far more to him than much of the work which the school program usually imposes. He may forget the name and lose all recollection of the personality of the teacher and of most of his schoolmates, but the striking picture is a picture still. That he will always remember. In our experience, as we grow older, if we are at all observant, we know more and more the value of these things--how great a factor in education they may become! Men wonder sometimes how they can expend a modest sum of money to good purpose in giving pleasure and profit to others. Get some pictures of good faces, and flowers, and landscapes, and other proper subjects, and put them upon the walls of your nearest school-house, or of some other in which you may be interested. When you have done this for one school you may want to do it for a second, or you will suggest to some other generous heart the like gift of enduring value. What chance have boys and girls with a dead-alive teacher in a school-house whose blank walls are eloquent of poverty? Oh, the weariness of it!