If he would reach the boy, the teacher must find a point of contact between the home life and the altogether new life in the school. This point is without doubt the nursery rhymes. Wise indeed are parents who have taught these melodies before the school age has been reached, for the teacher can start at once with the poems he intends to have learned. But where these rhymes have not been mastered in the home, it is imperative on the part of the first-grade teacher to have them mastered in the first school year. For the teacher who hesitates about the advisability of using the Mother Goose melodies, it may be well to state their claim by a quotation from Charles Welsh in his modest but most excellent collection called "A Book of Nursery Rhymes": "The direct simplicity, dramatic imagination, and spontaneous humour of the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose will probably never be excelled by any modern verse. They will for the most part doubtless remain for all time 'the light literature of the infant scholar.' Although some fragments of what has been written since the collection was first made may go to swell the volume of this inheritance from past ages, the selection of any permanent addition will be made finally by the mother and the child. The choice will be by no means a haphazard one, for it will be founded on basal elements of human character, and it will, for the very same cause, be an absolutely autocratic choice. Experience has proved these old rhymes and jingles to be best fitted for the awakening intelligence of the child. The appeal to the imagination by evoking a sense of wonder accounts for the abiding place which these rhymes and jingles have in the literature of the nursery." The truth of these words is so evident that the teacher who would make the learning of poetry by heart a pleasure must surely recognize such rhymes as the hitching-on place between the literature of the home and that of the school.