It will often be necessary for the teacher to shorten and otherwise edit the thing he chooses. There will come from time to time dull passages, descriptive passages, passages whose subject-matter is too mature, or in some other way undesirable for his class. He will often be able to economize effort and to secure a better unity of impression, by omitting what is mere enrichment of the picture or reinforcement of the teaching; such incidents may be removed without altering the meaning or the movement. The teacher must be experienced enough to recognize such unnecessary or superfluous incidents; otherwise he only mutilates his story in condensing it. When the children have advanced to some proficiency in reading, they will, of course, begin to read some of their own literature, reading aloud in the class and often having the text before them as the teacher reads. All the children that can read at all should, as a rule, have a printed copy of anything they are asked to memorize; and as a matter of social duty, the teacher of literature, or the teacher in the literature class, will from time to time have a careful exercise in reading for the younger readers; while he will have much reading aloud from the older grades; remembering that the inevitable obverse of receiving literature through the ear is the rendering it with the voice. But, on the whole, they will fare best if up to and probably through the sixth grade they receive what is distinctively literature through the ear. And even after that they should often hear their material rendered by a good reader in class, even though they may be required to read the same material over beforehand, or subsequent to the class reading. Every teacher should have in reserve a store of stories and poems, and beautiful passages from great masterpieces which he produces from time to time as a surprise to his class. This is many a time the most effective lesson possible--adding to the children's pleasure the delight of surprise, creating in them the impression of the inexhaustible supply of beautiful things, and testifying to their teacher's own joy in the things he wants them to love. Other minor and practical matters, more closely connected with the return from the children than the presentation to them, will be discussed in the next chapter.