“The number and inequality of my children rendered my task easier. Just as in a family the eldest and cleverest child readily shows what he knows to his younger brothers and sisters, and feels proud and happy to be able to take his mother’s place for a moment, so my children were delighted when they knew something that they could teach others. A sentiment of honour awoke in them, and they learned twice as well by making the younger ones repeat their words. In this way I soon had helpers and collaborators amongst the children themselves. When I was teaching them to spell difficult words by heart, I used to allow any child who succeeded in saying one properly to teach it to the others. These child-helpers, whom I had formed from the very outset, and who had followed my method step by step, were certainly much more useful to me than any regular schoolmasters could have been. “I myself learned with the children. Our whole system was so simple and so natural that I should have had difficulty in finding a master who would not have thought it undignified to learn and teach as I was doing.... “You will hardly believe that it was the Capuchin friars and the nuns of the convent that showed the greatest sympathy with my work. Few people, except Truttman, took any active interest in it. Those from whom I had hoped most were too deeply engrossed with their high political affairs to think of our little institution as having the least degree of importance. “Such were my dreams; but at the very moment that I seemed to be on the point of realizing them, I had to leave Stanz.”