I am a great advocate for the silent teaching, too, of really good pictures on the nursery walls. I do not like the idea of any rubbish being good enough for there, any crudely coloured, badly designed Christmas number atrocity being pinned up with pins or small nails, and called ‘pretty, pretty’ to some baby, who, I am thankful to say, not unseldom pulls it down and soon reduces it to the end it so richly deserves. Often a good picture is full of teaching to a thoughtful child. Excellent photographs can now be bought very cheaply, and some etchings are not too dear, but all should be carefully selected, either for the lesson or pleasant story they tell, for no one knows how much early impressions do for children, save those who vividly remember the small things that influenced themselves in their extreme youth, and are thus enabled to use their experience for their own or other people’s children; a lovely photograph of moonlight on the sea, for example, having given me personally more pleasure as a child, than any amount of dolls ever did, although I was heartily attached to them, and loved them as few children do now in these highly educated days of ours. Why, I remember we had quite a serious revolt in our schoolroom once, over this very picture subject. We as children were exceptionally lucky in our surroundings, and our schoolroom was hung with really good engravings of excellent pictures, many of them proofs of Sir Edwin Landseer’s, while many of our father’s works were there too, at which we were never tired of looking. I don’t think any one, save an artist’s children, could ever feel towards these said engravings quite as we did, for, being in a good many of them at all sorts of stages, we felt really the proprietorship in them that only the author is supposed to feel, while we were never tired of remembering the odds and ends of stories connected with the progress of each picture; and made other histories, too, for ourselves out of the motionless creatures that we were once, but out of whose knowledge we had so quickly grown: and then to hear that all these sources of our inspiration were to be torn from us, and what for? why, because in an educational frenzy maps were supposed to be better for us, and more in keeping in the schoolroom; and therefore our beloved pictures were to be put elsewhere to give place, forsooth, to glazed monstrosities, the very colours of which, crude greens and pinks and yellows, were enough to cause an æsthetic fever; although in those days æstheticism was a thing unknown, undescribed too, in any dictionary! But an appeal to a higher power brought the pictures back, and the maps were rolled up above them, and only allowed to fall over them at such times as they were required to show their ugly faces to us in a geography lesson; a subject I have detested, I am sorry to say, simply because, I verily believe, of the rage we were in when we heard our dear pictures were to be taken from us!