To meet the requirements of the Code it was necessary for school teachers to have a stock of simple anecdotes, and to this end publishers brought out collections of stories, sometimes serious, moral, improving; sometimes more or less humorous; but nearly always quite unsuitable. Our children have a very limited vocabulary, and the long words and involved sentences that occur in such compilations completely bewildered them. Or, if by any chance there was a simpler story, it would probably have only one incident; and, being of so elementary a type, would be inadequate for the latter part of the school year, when we expected two or more stages in the plot. For instance: (1) Androcles meets a lion in pain and removes a thorn from his foot. (2) The lion, being invited to eat Androcles, recognizes his benefactor and declines the meal. But Androcles was not our style of hero. An experienced school manager once pointed out to me the need for educating the faculty of humour in children. “Look at old Whackem,” he said, indicating the master, “there is no surgical operation that would have any effect on that man’s humorous receptivity. He ought to have been caught young.” I banished Androcles and the like, and collected the stories which Mark Twain disliked, the stories with “a snap” to them: these I put into simple English, and then tried to get the class to find the snap. In an old portfolio I find half a dozen of them, almost illegible with age, and they bring back memories of much of that “unquenchable laughter” which I tried to teach Standard V. to share with Olympus. How popular was “The Lady Doctor”!--she who in vol. i. took out the patient’s eye, and put it on a table, while she was arranging bandages. But (vol. ii.) the landlady’s cat ate the eye, thinking it was its dinner. In vol. iii. the lady doctor killed the cat, took out its eye, put it in the unsuspecting patient’s head, and sent him away whole. “But the ungrateful patient complains that he is always looking for mice, and that the sight of a dog makes his hair stand on end.” More popular still was Boccaccio’s story of the crane. I believe it has appeared in all the languages of Europe, but not in school anecdote books. May I repeat it here? Those who know it have their remedy. The original, which is slightly altered for school use, is in the Decameron, VI. Day, IV. Novel: A dishonest cook was one day roasting a crane for her master’s supper. When it was done, it looked so nice that she thought she must just taste it, and she tore off a leg and ate it. When the rest of the bird was served up for supper, the master saw what had been done, and angrily scolded her for taking the leg. “Oh, master,” she said, “those birds have only one leg.” “Only one leg, woman? Come with me in the morning to the river bank, and I will teach you better than that.”