The question of light has a direct bearing on the children's
behavior. Ask any school teacher, if you have never had occasion
to notice it yourself, which days are the noisiest in her
school-room, the bright, sunny ones, or the dingy days when it is
difficult to see clearly across the room. Ask her if the pencils
don't drop on the floor oftener, if small feet do not tramp and
scrape more, if chairs don't tip over with louder reports, if
tempers are not more keenly on edge, on a dark day than a bright
one. I need not say "yes," for one hundred out of a hundred will
say it emphatically. So, if you cannot have a room bright with
sunshine, do at least be lavish with artificial light, for your
own peace of mind.
Floors rendered noiseless by some good covering help wonderfully
to keep voices pitched low. I have seen this illustrated almost
amusingly in Newark, where frequent visits of large classes were
made from the schools to the public library. The tramp of forty
or fifty pairs of feet in the marble corridors made such a noise
that the legitimate questions and answers of children and
librarian had to be given in tones to be heard over the noise of
the feet. The change that came over the voices and faces as the
class stepped on the noiseless "Nightingale" flooring of the
great reading room was almost funny. The feet made no noise,
therefore it was not necessary to raise the voice to be heard,
and no strictures of attendants were needed to maintain quiet in
that room.
Under the head of furniture I will give only one or two hints of
things worth remembering. One is that whatever you decide upon
for a chair, in point of size, shape, or style, make sure, before
you pay your bill, that it cannot be easily overturned. If you
have a chair that will tip over every time a child's cloak swings
against it, your wrinkles will multiply faster than your years
warrant. And reason firmly with your electrician if he has any
plan in mind of putting lamps on your tables of such a sort that
they positively invite the boy of a scientific (or Satanic) turn
of mind to astonish the other children by the way the lights
brighten and go out, all because he has discovered that a gentle
pressure to his foot on the movable plug under the table can be
managed so as to seem purely innocent and accidental while he
sits absorbed in the contents of his book. I would also ask why
it is that librarians think we need so MUCH furniture, when our
rooms are as small as they sometimes are? We seem to think it
inevitable that the floor space should be filled up with tables,
but, as Mr. Anderson remarked in his paper at Magnolia, if we saw
a family at home gathered around the table, leaning their elbows
upon it and facing the light, we should think it a very unnatural
and unhygienic position to adopt. Why should we, in the library,
encourage children to do just what physiologists tell us they
should not do? Why provide tables at all for any but those
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